(x-posted to YatPundit and YatCuisine)



We all encounter things that "speak" to us. Things that, when our senses encounter them, we are immediately transported to a different place and time. Sometimes we're transported to places not of this earth. Just as the music of Renard Poche takes me to a place and time very special to me, the artwork of H. Eric Hartman often does the same. Combine the return after the storm of one of my favorite places to eat in New Orleans (Bud's Broiler on City Park Avenue) with Eric's talent and, well, you get the painting above.

I first met Eric Hartman, *art-man*, in the summer of 1976, when I became an associate member of Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity at the University of New Orleans. Eric has a rare degenerative disease which has left his vision severely impaired.  He turned away from his banking career and took up his art full-time in 1995.

Eric's Bud's painting captures the soul of this small burger joint in Mid City.

Hartman's painting has been reproduced as a limited-number poster series. The poster costs $30, and is available for purchase at Bud's Broiler on City Park, or direct from Eric (ehartman@artman.com).

Bud's Broiler on City Park Avenue, before Da Storm

(x-posted to ebranley.com and my DailyKos diary)

This photo has been on my personal blog (ebranley.com) for years, because it's both a conversation-starter and a good reminder of a lot of fun times for me. Bud's Broiler is, of course, a local burger chain here in metro New Orleans. This one is located at the corner of City Park Avenue and Conti Street, in Mid-City. It's right next to the Masonic Cemetery and more-or-less across the street from Delgado Junior College.

My Bud's Broiler memories go back to my childhood, when my dad (who worked for 35 years at the University of New Orleans) would take us to the Bud's on Pedopilas Street, just off of Elysian Fields and Gentilly Road. This place had the classic wooden tables with graffiti carved in them, but it also had this weird rock-and-cactus terrarium in the back I could never figure out. The location closed in the 1980s, eventually re-opening up Elysian Fields near Leon C. Simon, in the building that used to be Luigi's Pizza Parlor. They lost the lease on that location just before the storm, and never re-opened any Gentilly location post-K.

The Gentilly Bud's was one of our second homes, given its proximity to Brother Martin. Still, since I slept in Metairie at that time (I never say I "grew up" in Metairie, because my formative life experiences all took place in Gentilly or Mid City), I would regularly ride the Esplanade bus down City Park Avenue to the end of the line at Canal Blvd. If it was late (after drill team practice when I was a sophomore, or academic games or debate all the years I was there), I'd stop for a Bud's burger and walk back to Canal Blvd. to catch the Veterans bus back to Metairie. When we were on Brother Martin's Prep Quiz Bowl team, we'd go to WYES-TV on Navarre Ave. to compete, then stop at Bud's on City Park after for a late lunch.

When my high school days turned into university days, the route to UNO wasn't all that much different from the route to BMHS, so there were frequent stops at Bud's on City Park. The location is just a bit to the east of all the head-of-Canal cemeteries, so it's close when I'm haunting those locales, taking photos.

To sum it up, this Bud's is a small but regular part of my life. I even made a quick note about the place in March of 2005. When it got swallowed up by about 4'of water in the storm, I was initially heartbroken, but after checking it out, I saw that the structure looked like it pretty much survived. Certainly it fared better than most of Gentilly.

Of course, Bud's Broiler lived on in spite of the storm. The location on Clearview Pkwy re-opened in the second week of September, 2005, giving Kev and I one of the few places we could get a meal while trying to sort out the house. Soon after that, the Kenner location re-opened, and eventually the chain expanded, adding a location just off N. Causeway Blvd., across the street from Lakeside Mall. (There used to be a location in Fat City, but that closed years ago, Drago's taking over the space as a banquet room.)

When one of my Twitter friends messaged that she noticed activity at the City Park Avenue location earlier this year, my spirits lifted. So many of my old haunts in Gentilly drowned on 29-Aug-2005 that I was truly happy to see Bud's coming back.

Of course, fate would have it that the grand re-opening of City Park Avenue would happen while I was in England, so naturally it was my first lunch stop upon my return to the heat and humidity that is home.



The counter hasn't changed all that much. They use a more automated ordering system now, though. Instead of the old paper order checks, the cashier punches up the order on a much-more-modern cash register, which generates the number they call.



Looka how narrow the place is! The owners have expanded the seating by opening the upstairs. I always figured someone lived up there, in true NOLA fashion, but now it makes sense to use upstairs for table space.



A Number 4 with sauce and onions, cheese fries, and a chocolate shake. It don't get much better than that, cap.

03-05 June TSI0460 (Modular Essentials) Altrincham, UK
08-12 June TSI0460 Altrincham, UK (two classes 2.5 days each)
15-19 June TSI0460 Altrincham, UK (two classes 2.5 days each)
22-26 June TSI0460 Altrincham, UK (two classes 2.5 days each)


06-08 July TSI0945 Managing Storage Performance with Hitachi Tuning Manager Software v6 (ILT)
09-10 July TSI1848 Hitachi Tuning Manager Software v6.1 Advanced Operations (ILT)
(Both classes in San Diego, CA)

13-17 July UNAVAILABLE

03-05 Aug TSI0945 Managing Storage Performance with Hitachi Tuning Manager Software v6 (ILT)
06-07 Aug TSI1848 Hitachi Tuning Manager Software v6.1 Advanced Operations (ILT)
(Both classes in Toronto, ON, Canada)

17-19 Aug THI0515 Hitachi Data Systems Storage Foundations - Modular (ILT)
Toronto, ON, Canada

24-27 Aug THI0517 Hitachi Data Systems Storage Foundations - Enterprise (ILT)
San Diego, CA, USA

31-Aug - 02-Sep CSI0158 In-system Replication Fundamentals for Hitachi Modular Storage (ILT)
Dallas, TX, USA

14-17 Sep THI0517 Hitachi Data Systems Storage Foundations - Enterprise (ILT)
Toronto, ON, Canada

21-25 Sep TSI1315 Hitachi Enterprise Software Solutions (ILT)
New York, NY, USA

28-30 Sep TSI0945 Managing Storage Performance with Hitachi Tuning Manager Software v6 (ILT)
01-02 Oct TSI1848 Hitachi Tuning Manager Software v6.1 Advanced Operations (ILT)
(Both classes in San Diego, CA)

UPDATE: I was informed by dKos readers that the Kindle2 now has a USB port, and non-DRM content can be backed up.

The Sony Reader PRS-700BC is the latest model in their ebook reader series. I'm now the proud owner of one, and, as promised, I'm sharing some of my thoughts on why I chose the Sony over Amazon's Kindle.

Sony Reader PRS-700BC

After months of indecision, i broke down and bought the Sony Reader last week.  I bought the newest model, the PRS-700BC, at the Fry's store in Palo Alto, CA.  The 6inch display is a high-quality, easy to read, and the backlight works well in restaurants (it got a good testing at Faultline Brewing Company in Sunnyvale, where I had dinner at the bar twice last week.)

Sony Reader - bottom view

From left to right on the bottom of the reader, there's a hook to lock the Reader down, the slide switch for the backlight, DC adapter in (in yellow), mini-USB port, headphone jack (in green), and an audio volume toggle.  A DC adapter is optional; the Reader will charge through the USB port, but using the adapter speeds up the process dramatically.

The view from the top

The top of the Reader has the power switch, a memory stick slot, and a SD-card slot. You can see just how thin the Reader is from these profile shots.  The device weighs about 12oz, including the cover. 

Sony Reader's windows application

The Reader comes with a Windows-based "library" application that is easy to use.  You want to download a book or PDF to the Reader, drag-and-drop the file into the application.  You can access documents directly from the Reader by loading them onto a memory stick or SD card, but this can be a problem for PDF files.  I dropped a couple of PDFs onto my SD, popped it into the Reader, and it rendered the entire page on the screen at the same time.  That made the font so small, it was all but unreadable.  The Sony Reader's library app converts PDFs for use on the device, allowing the user to adjust viewing size of the documents. 

"Why didn't you buy a Kindle?"

Good question.  First, some background on me and ebook readers.  Until the widespread use of smartphones, I owned several Palm PDA models, going back to the PalmPilot.  For years now, MobiMate has sold ebooks in both TXT and PRC (native Palm) formats.  The MobiPocket reader works well on the Palm platforms.  Combine it with Documents to Go, and I was set for quite some time.  My last Palm platform was the LifeDrive, and in its landscape mode, I was able to get a good bit of text on the screen for ebook reading.  Still, the book-style readers called out to me, forcing me to choose between the Sony and the Amazon Kindle.

There are several reasons I chose the Sony over the Kindle. 

• "HotSync" - The lack of local, hard-wire sync capability on the Kindle disturbed me.  As a long-time Palm user, I like the idea of being able to backup content on the reader to my computer. 
  
  
• Reading PDFs - I do a lot of technical training, and the materials I use are invariably distributed as PDF documents.  Within a day of purchasing my Reader, I downloaded 100 technical and courseware PDFs to it.  To do that on a Kindle, I'd have to e-mail the documents to Amazon, then pay ten cents per PDF to have Amazon transmit them back to the Kindle!  I've got two problems with that.  First, Amazon doesn't deserve the ten bucks, and second, many of the documents I read are considered to be "company confidential" by those who wrote them.  I don't want to upload their intellectual property to Amazon's servers. 
  
  
• DRM - I was a big fan of the TV show "Studio 60," but it came on Sunday nights, and I was often on planes or in airports when it came on.   I'm enough of a fan that I paid the two-bucks-per-episode that Amazon charged to download them, so I could keep up.  I downloaded them to my laptop at the time, which passed away this time last year.  I backed up all my video files, but alas, Amazon's files were DRM (Digital Rights Management)-protected.  This meant I couldn't transfer the videos to my new notebook.  My $40 investment went down the drain.
  
  Well, fool me once, and I won't get fooled again, as the saying goes.  When I read that the Kindle was employing a proprietary format (AZW, a DRM-locked variant of the MOBI file format).  No, thanks!  To quote Wired.com, "Kindle isn't so much a reader device as a portable DRM bookstore." I don't have a problem with anybody making a buck, including Amazon, but there are many ways to buy ebooks, and there are many utilities to beat DRM access limitations to protect your investment.  I wanted a reader that would allow these options.

To Be Continued...

There are a number of features I haven't worked with or fully tested on the Reader.  I haven't run the battery into the dirt yet, nor have I tried out its audio-playback capability.  So, this saga will continue.

(following Dayna's lead)

the title is a bit over-the-top, but what the heck, here it goes.  Links all point back to Amazon:


1.  Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz.  I read this in 1983, based on the recommendation of someone on Compuserve or some such.  By this point, I'd been reading fantasy novels pretty intensely for years, but there was always that disconnect between the universes created by sword-and-sorcery authors and historical reality, much less contemporary life.  Along comes Kurtz, who is medieval historian by training.  Her melding of Catholicism, sword-and-sorcery (magic powers, etc) as well as ritual magic, had a profound effect on me.  Mages and witches weren't merely casting spells and zapping each other with bolts of energy, they were performing magical rituals in a Catholic context!  Latin prayers, invocations, magic as part of the liturgy, all made something click inside my brain, the notion that Catholicism and sword-and-sorcery aren't so far apart. 

2.  Tom Swift And His Flying Lab by Victor Appleton II.  I read this in fourth grade, arguably my first science fiction novel.  I eventually read all of the Tom Swift novels, as they were mainstays of the J. C. Ellis Elementary School library.

3.  Commodore Hornblower by C. S. Forester.  When I was in 4th-5th grade, we lived in an apartment on Martin Behrman in Metairie.  My parents sold one house and the plan was to build a new one, hence the apartment.  There was no public library in Bucktown at the time, so we got regular visits from the Bookmobile.  One of the librarians who drove the bookmobile was a friend of my dad's from the American Legion, Mr. Jim Callahan.  Mr. Jim would hand me a book some weeks and just say "read this," and off I'd go.  One of those books was "The Indomitable Hornblower," a collection of three of Forester's stories of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.  Hornblower inspired me to look further into the Napoleonic period, which has become a lifelong passion. 

4.  I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.  One of the first "serious" SF novels I ever read, the first one of the semester in Mr. Tony Hartigan's English class in my sophomore year at Brother Martin.  It's really a collection of some of Asimov's robot-related short stories, which led me to Caves of Steel, the rest of the robot books, all the way to the Foundation novels.

5.  The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien.  My friend Gus Altobello started reading LotR when we were just finishing up our senior year at BMHS in 1976.  At his urging, I broke down and bought the three-book boxed paperback set later that summer, after the UNO summer semester ended.  I became so engrossed in the story that I stayed up for about 36 hours reading them all the way through.  What made LotR "life-changing" was that I had very little interest in fantasy/sword-and-sorcery at this point in my life.  I was a classic "hard SF" reader, having absorbed a bunch of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein in high school, and elves, fairies, dragons, etc., just didn't hold much for me.  That outlook changed when I read Tolkien, to the point where I obsessed with getting one of the first copies of The Silmarillion that hit New Orleans.

6.  The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide by John S. Quarterman.  I read this book when it came out in 1989.  It inspired me to convert my bulletin board system computer (BBS) into a system that operated first on FidoNet, then as a full-blown Internet e-mail site (mintir.la.us).  That led to a delicious on-line obsession. 

7.  Computer Programming in the Basic Language by Neal Golden, S.C., Ph.D.  Brother Neal's book!  the original version of the book was mimeographed and given to us in a big red binder.  By the time we were seniors in 1976, it was a trade-size paperbook textbook.  When I began BMHS as an 8th grader in the fall of 1971, Brother invited several of us to start the school's first 8th grade team in for the game Equations.  Being the geeks we were, he also let us work with his book and learn BASIC programming.  My dad's passion for electronics motivated me, but it was Brother Neal's book that showed me I had the skills to do computers for a living.

8.  Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children-- and other streets of New Orleans in words and pictures, by John Churchill Chase.  The book had been around for over 20 years by the time I bought a signed copy from the WYES auction in 1983, but it was the book that demonstrated to me that well-written books about New Orleans were a good idea.  It was one of those "I can do that!" moments for me.  It would be another 12 years before things came together and I wrote the streetcar book, but the point where I just knew I could do it was when I read Chase. 

9.  The Frugal Gourmet Cooks With Wine, by Jeff Smith.  I'd been cooking for Helen and I since we got married in 1982, but this book moved me to go beyond simple cooking into full-blown gourmet foods.  Jeff Smith's style, combined with his energy on his PBS television show, really got me into cooking.  It was 1986, we had just bought our house, and I had a decent-sized kitchen to play in. 

10.  The Clinton Wars by Sidney Blumenthal.  It was clear to me since I was in high school that I identified as a liberal, but Blumenthal's insider account of Clinton's administration and the impeachment convinced me that conservatism and the Republican Party must be crushed so they simply cannot do more damage to this country.

Since all the Kool Kidz on Facebook are doing it:

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.

3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

4) Tally your total at the bottom.



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling  X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X+
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy Z X
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (sorta fits with 33, but OK) X+
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden *
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X +
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X+
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances odgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce *
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X+
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X+
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

40 for me

LinkedIn: University of New Orleans Alumni Group

LinkedIn Privateers

University of New Orleans Alumni Group

Welcome to the home of the LinkedIn Privateers, a LinkedIn group for UNO alums.

If you are a UNO alum and a member of LinkedIn, click this link to be invited to join the group:

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/38530/76F4F4423440

Some useful links:

LinkedIn Home

Members of LinkedIn Privateers

University of New Orleans

UNO Athletics

UNO Alumni Association

I usually listen to "The Writer's Almanac" on-line these days, but I happened to catch it in the car this evening. Today's was a special treat, because the segment marked the passing on this day of James Joyce in 1941. Your man Joyce wrote a number of outstanding books, but the the treat of WA today was to hear Keillor read the last, then the first sentence of Finnegans Wake.

And if that wasn't good enough, today's poem is "In the South, In the North," by Peg Lauber. Here's the last stanza:

Soon St. Charles Avenue, the regular route, will be filled
with high school bands and marching feet, arms waving,
voices crying, "Throw me something, mister," to those
on the floats, as the lines and trees above are decorated
with gold, purple, and green beads, the royal colors of Rex,
against the blue void we call sky.

Go to today's WA segment and listen to Mr. Keillor receite it. Wonderful stuff. The poem is part of a collection of Lauber's poems called New Orleans Suite.

Most HDS classes are three or four days, so it's possible for me to schedule appointments in metro New Orleans some weeks.  Contact me for more details. 

January - March, 2009

05-Jan - HDS Enterprise Foundations, NYC
12-Jan - HDS AMS 2000 Family Architecture and Administration, San Diego
19-Jan - Available
26-Jan - HDS Enterprise Foundations, Berne, Switzerland

02-Feb - HDS Enterprise Foundations, Vienna, Austria
09-Feb - HDS Enterprise Foundations, Stockholm Sweden
16-Feb - Available
23-Feb - HDS Modular Foundations, Atlanta

02-Mar - HDS Enterprise Foundations, Hanover, MD
09-Mar - HDS HDLM/HGLAM, Hanover, MD
16-Mar - HDS Modular Foundations, Bellevue, WA
23-Mar - HDS Enterprise Foundations, Salt Lake City
30-Mar - HDS Modular Foundations, Santa Clara

As always, some of these will change because of enrollment, etc.  

I discovered the Deryni novels in 1980.  Kurtz had completed the first Kelson trilogy, and was publishing the second trilogy, which explored the Deryni universe 200 years prior to Kelson's birth.  Having developed a keen interest in magick and the occult in real life, I as very drawn to the notion that one could be Christian and also pratice the ars magica, as the Deryni do.  The Deryni view their abilities as gifts from God, no matter what their contemporary church fathers believe.  I absorbed the first three novels in short order, and have been hooked on the Deryni ever since.  I felt the need for some real escape in my reading, so I grabbed King Kelson's Bride off the shelf for a re-read.

King Kelson's Bride (KKB) is the last novel canonically (so far) in Katherine's "Deryni" series.  Starting in 1970 with Deryni Rising, Kurtz has weaved the tale of the magical race known as the Deryni through fifteen novels (with at least one more on the way) and numerous short stories.  The setting is the Eleven Kingdoms, a world roughly analogous to medieval Europe.  The Kingdom of Gwynnedd is the focal point of the series.  Kelson Haldane, King of Gwynnedd is fourteen years old wh.en his father is murdered in Deryni Rising.  By the time of KKB, he is twenty-one and under intense pressure from his advisors to marry and produce heirs. 

The almost-eight years of Kelson's reign have been intense and active, starting with a magical challenge to his throne on the day of his coronation, another magical challenge in the first year, a full-out war, as well as having to deal with a traitor in his family.  All this is detailed in two trilogies, the "Chronicles of the Deryni" and the "Histories of King Kelson." KKB ties up loose ends left at the conclusion of the last novel about Kelson, The Quest for Saint Camber.  It's like when a popular TV series ends or is cancelled and they bring the cast back a year or two later for a TV-movie to pull it all together. 

The big loose end in Kelson's tale is, of course, his choice for a bride.  Having his plans for marriage foiled twice (for different reasons) already, Kelson is reticent to try a third time.  The needs of state, of course, take precedence over Kelson's personal life, so back into the matrimonial sea he goes.  The primary concern of state is that the king of Torenth, the nation just to the east of Gwynnedd has reached his majority (14), and will naturally be pressured to marry by his own councillors.  That king, Liam-Lajos, has been fostered at the court of Gwynnedd for the last four years, serving as one of Kelson's squires.  Now Kelson must accompany Liam-Lajos home to assume his crown.

Oh yeah, and Kelson needs to settle upon a bride.

The most fascinating aspect of the Deryni universe is how Kurtz blends sword-and-sorcery with real-world religious concepts.  Christians in Gwynnedd owe their spiritual allegiance to the Church Militant, a church whose theology is similar to the Roman Catholic Church of the real world.  Unlike the real world, however, the Church's main enemies and threats are not those of other religions (like Muslims or Jews) but the Deryni, whose mastery of the ars magica is considered heretical.  The Church-Deryni conflict is a binding theme across the entire series of novels and stories.  Torenth, however, is a country where the Church recognizes and embraces the Deryni and their powers.  Their version of Christianity is in the style of real-world Greek/Eastern Orthodox practice.  KKB offers the reader a glimpse into the Eastern rites, a fascinating diversion from the Latin practices that Kurtz has woven into the stories so well.

Of course, Kelson gets his bride in the end, but Kurtz still leaves a few loose ends about in case she decides to re-visit Kelson and his queen.