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Tonight we drove past a sign reading "Ellis & Salazar".

This will really only amuse people who paid way too much attention to Cartographer's Craft, but I started laughing anyway.

It's an auto body shop. I hear they're real wizards when it comes to fixing dents.

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My library books are overdue so I thought I'd share the quotes I thought worth keeping from the two books I decided not to finish before returning them:

From The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey
This is a good premise and an interesting story, but it's incredibly badly told. The scholarship is sound, if unfocused, and to be honest I just got impatient waiting to get to the interesting bits.

Even the name John Mandeville seems to have been a fabrication, leaving open -- and probably unanswerable -- the question of who wrote the Travels, and why. "The abundant identifying marks vanish on approach like mirages, and the extrordinarily ingenious efforts to name the author have failed," observed Greenblatt. "The actual identity, the training, the motives, even the nationality of the person who wrote Mandeville's Travels have become, under scholarly scrutiny, quite unclear...Mandeville is radically empty."

From Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson
This is actually, I suspect, a really good book. I picked it up because when I was in Galveston everyone said I should read it, since it concerns the great Galveston storm of 1900. But the thing is....I really don't enjoy reading about disasters, and I'm not that interested in meteorology. I couldn't get past the first 20 pages.

The railroad come-ons painted Texas as a paradise of benign weather, when in fact hurricanes scoured its coast, plumes of hot wind baked apples in its trees, and "blue northers" could drop the temperature fifty degrees in a matter of minutes. To Isaac, such quirks of weather were a fascination, and not just because he happened to be the chief weatherman in Texas. He was also a physician [...] and in this carried forth a tradition laid down by Hippocrates, who believed climate determined the character of men and nations. Hippocrates advised any physician arriving in an unfamiliar town to first "examine its position with respect to the winds."