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.

Today the museums were closed so I spent all morning looking at the fashionable boutiques on Via Della Spiga. It's kind of beyond Rodeo Drive, not so purely a matter of familiar upscale chain stores. Essentially any brand you see advertised in Vogue has a presence in Milano: Dolce & Gabbana, Moschino, Prada/Miu Miu, Armani, Valentino, Gio Moretti, and many more that are less well-known. Marni had maybe the most outrageous item: a tweed diaper for women. Why hide so much as a single millimeter of those gorgeous gams! Wear a nanoskirt with a swaddling strap!

I walked the half-mile length of Via Della Spiga three or four times, studying it, going into some of the stores, mulling it over, also killing time till I could have lunch. There weren't many shoppers, it being Monday morning. More fashion-biz types in the street than anything else. A Mercedes limo picking up some guys at D&G. Here's a cheerful fashion couple, probably in the biz. Hard to make out, but she's wearing bicycle-riding bands to clamp in the bottoms of her pants.

What is fashion about? In some sense it's an art of making colored shapes, a kind of sculpture. Purses in particular can get quite abstract, like this D&G number.

But there's layers of meaning as well; a purse is perhaps a symbol of a woman's essential femininity. And in this Gio Moretti offering, we see the purse in bondage, perhaps subjugated to the male, yet wearing an outrageous girls-world color and sprouting a hopeful pair of hearts. Love springs eternal.

Fashion is plumage, adornment with various alternative purposes: call attention to you as an individual, make you look like a member of the in-crowd or of the powerful crowd, display your wealth, make you blend in, make you look like a poor person, make you look sexy, make you look like a leprous but memorable clown.

One odd thing to me is that many high-fashion customers look frozen-faced, uptight. Seems like fashion ought to be fun? Think back to high-school, to the rich kids who had the best clothes. Often as not these were nasty, unhappy people. Like — Paris Hilton? In the most negative sense, we might imagine a fashion plate to be a dish with an empty center.

But there are always the people who do fashion for fun, perhaps in a freestyle way. I have to reach no further than daughter Georgia, famous among her family and friends for her striking thrift outfits. I seem to recall that she got her high-school prom dress for a dollar…and some of her classmates wished they had one like it!

Eventually I escaped the cyclotron of Via Della Spiga and found a nice free art show honoring a local 20th century artist, Dino Caponi. The show's title was, “Il Metafisica dell'Esistensa.” More up my usual street, that.

In what ways is making a beautiful painting different from making a beautiful shoe?

A painting or a novel tends to be about expressing something about the external world, the artist's inner self, the interface between the two, and the relation of work to other works in the history of art/writing. A shoe expresses something too, but what? Aren’t these Prada jobbies nice? Why don’t men get to wear nice clothes? The world grows its strange forms, including humans and their actions.

This is all research, you understand, what with the possibility of an SF fashion angle. As the Sheck-man once said, “The SF writer is consumed by a rage to extrapolate.” The better I can understand fashion now, the better I can write about what they’ll be wearing in the year Y3K. (I don’t think it will be Star Trek uniforms!)

And yes, I know, for a man, even worse, a mathematician-hacker, to be trying to understand fashion is a bit like a dog trying to understand haute cuisine, standing all four legs on the dining-table gobbling down the Thanksgiving turkey. “This is good. Woof!” I wish Sylvia could be here to share this with.