Chrononautic Log: life

September 5, 2006

It’s a long time since I posted any pictures, and I know not all y’all are into the minutiae of scientifictional politics. Plus, I now have visitors in town, and have therefore actually been going places and seeing things worth taking pictures of.

Figure 1. Preparation for guests: living room, empty, but livable.

Figure 1. Sunday morning: living room, being lived in.

More pictures after the cut.

(Continued)

Comments (9)

September 3, 2006

. . . not necessarily in that order.

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Update (Sun. 9/3) Y’all who posted your original comments in indisputably public places, if any of you would prefer not to have any more attention drawn to them, I can take those down too.

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Just so y’all know, I’m on Central European Time and I’ll be going to sleep in short order, so while, as previously noted, I’m happy to take quotes down at the original poster’s request, this will probably not happen instantly.

Update (Sat. 9/2): Okay, it’s 12:30AM CET (3:30PM Pacific time); I really am going to sleep now. (Don’t be surprised if I don’t have time tomorrow to read every flame you leave this [North American] evening. But I’ll do my best.)

A quick roundup of some of the discussion arising from the recent unpleasantness, divided into three categories:

• Typical
• Depressing
• Encouraging

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Updated: Fixed internal links, added second post from Bear.

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Updated: Added context at Ms. Datlow’s request.

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Updated: Removed Beth Bernobich quote at her request, and added a pointer to the good work she and Jim Hines are doing at bellwether_talk.

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Updated: Removed Raymond E. Feist quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed William Sanders quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed Vera Nazarian quote at her request.

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Updated: Removed Jane Yolen quote at her request.

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Updated: Added link from Shalanna Collins quote to her comments below.

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Updated: Removed Jack Skillingstead quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed Harry Turtledove quote at his request.

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Note: I’ve made public, here, excerpts from several posts from what is technically a private newsgroup, albeit one open to hundreds if not thousands of readers. I didn’t do this lightly. If anyone I’ve quoted would prefer not to stand behind those words in public I will be happy to remove them. Likewise, if my quotation misrepresents what you said, I apologize, and will be happy to fix it if you let me know.

Those of you who think something should be done about this may be interested to know that my access to the SFWA forums has been suspended.

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Typical:

• William Sanders:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Shalanna Collins:

  I think I know what a "GROPE" would look like, and I didn't SEE any naughty patting, touching, squeezing (oops, invoking the Journey song there for a moment.) Nevertheless, a very contrite apology was publicly posted all over the net. ... This was just a momentary tweak, not assault or murder or what-have-you, for goodness' sake. I don't condone sexism or hassling women/men by touching them, but seriously, this isn't some big ponderous Sin.

  (Ellison forums, 2006/08/31)

  Ed.: Ms. Collins doesn’t condone sexism or hassling women/men by touching them — except, apparently, when it’s perpetrated by a famous author. She also seems to be somewhat confused about the meaning of “contrite,” and possibly “apology.”

  Update: Ms. Collins has commented here.

Depressing:

• Beth Bernobich

  Text removed at original poster’s request. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought Beth approved, at all, of what Harlan did, and I’m sorry I gave that impression. I simply found one parenthetical remark she made to be deeply depressing. Beth is on the side of the angels, as you can see at the bellwether_talk LJ community she and Jim Hines have set up to discuss the problem of sexism in the SF community.

• Raymond E. Feist

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Vera Nazarian

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Ellen Datlow (Updated)

  I was offline for a day or two after the con and then when I got back I discovered this whole brouhaha over Harlan's baby schtick -and that's what it was. A schtick of Harlan acting like a baby. Thus, he went up to the mike when Connie called him up -- he put the mike (a round one) into his mouth, swallowing it like a lollipop, Connie took it gently out of his mouth and wiped it off. He gurgled -- like a baby -- and then grabbed her breast like a baby and she smacked his hand off. A few seconds later she kissed him.... Cmon people. Please put this into perspective. It was NOT sexual assault. It was a joke/schtick gone a bit over the top. I was not offended as a woman watching this. I thought it was silly (but yes, I admit I personally thought the schtick funny). I also know that Connie and Harlan have a history of ribbing each other. I've seen it in the past. So please keep the incident in context and calm down.

  (Ellison forums, 2006/08/30)

  Ed.: Ellen, you grew up with these people. You’ve had time to get used to the way they behave and come to terms with it. We haven’t. And I don’t think we should have to.

• Jack Skillingstead:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

Encouraging:

• Ed Champion:

  It’s one thing to goof around at a party — when the people know the other people involved and a little bit of this kind of nonsense sometimes occurs.

  But when a woman goes up on stage and cannot be respected as a writer, particularly a writer who’s as great as Connie Willis, when she must be groped and demeaned as a sex object in front of an audience, then the time has come to re-evaluate the merits of the organization that hosts the awards ceremony, as well as the has-been "legends" who go up to claim and present awards.

  (“Harlan Ellison: The Norman Mailer of Speculative Fiction,” 2006/08/28)

• Gavin Grant:

  Worldcon: sorry, the eejit has put you on the spot and a public statement is needed.

  What’s up with these dirty old men? They’re taking all the fun out of being in the genre and not inspiring anyone with anything but horror and the urge to vomit and throw out their books.

  (“Harlan Ellison: eejit,” 2006/08/28)

• Alan DeNiro:

  It makes me wonder — how must a woman just entering the field feel about this? Younger female readers? What could they possibly think about this? Could they possiblly think anything good about SF/F? As a field? A community?

  (“Down the Rabbit Hole,” 2006/08/28)

• Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

  Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis on stage at the Hugos wasn't funny and it wasn't okay. ... [T]he basic message of Ellison's tit-grab is this: "Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. ... You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will."

  It's not okay. It's not funny. It wasn't a blow against bourgeois pieties or political correctness. It was just pathetic and nasty and sad and most of us didn't want to watch it. It's another thing that's going to stop.

  (“LAcon IV,” 2006/08/28)

• Ben Rosenbaum:

  Here's the context: it seems that a lot of men — particularly, to hear women my age tell it, older, powerful men — in science fiction feel like women's bodies are fair game. Whether it's for a gag, a thrill, or a "sit down and shut the fuck up, bitch", this kind of thing goes on beyond the Hugo stage. A lot.

  As it does in the wider world. A friend of mine who attended the Hugos had just been tit-grabbed by a stranger riding by on a bicycle in the street outside the Hugos the night before. Just for a minute of fun, because she was a woman, he brought her to tears of rage. For her, you grabbing Connie — and Connie's first horrified reaction before she covered beautifully and went on with the show — was the same damn thing, and the message was: you're not safe anywhere.

  . . . Mind, I'm not worried about Connie. For one thing, Connie's no victim, and for another, that's between you and her.

  No, I'm talking about the atmosphere in science fiction. We applauded a sexual assault at the Hugos, and now the web is full of folks saying "what's the big deal? get over it". I don't think I need to tell you that that is fucked up.

  Ed.: At time of press, Mr. Rosenbaum’s open letter has as yet gone unanswered except by one Mr. Goldberg, whose plaintive “What more do you guys want?” is undermined by his less than perceptive “Harlan has apologized profusely.”

  (“What I Told Harlan Ellison,” 2006/08/28)

• Elizabeth Bear:

  It's not just the tit-grab. It's also poking Rachel in the stomach uninvited.

  When I say "This is so not okay," I mean the pattern of treating women as if their personal space is not sovereign.

  Rachel and Connie are both strong women, and more than capable of standing up to Harlan. They get to decide how they want to respond to a given incident directed at them. (And both seem to have.) But I think, as a community, we need to say "This type of behavior is beyond the pale and will not be tolerated."

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/29)

• Zoë Selengut:

  ...for fuck's sake, this is not just another "being a jerk" incident. ... It's a whole universe away from mere snottiness, drama-queenage, or provocative whatever. This is disgustingly sexist behavior, and it is not okay to class rank sexism under the jerk umbrella, as if it's something we'd all do if we lacked social graces and let our id take control. Being a rude and abrasive person is one thing, and treating women's bodies like public property is another.... It drives me nuts to see this classed in the same category as other amusing Ellison anecdotes (I admit, I do find a lot of them amusing, or did.) It's not. the same. thing.

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/29)

• Jane Yolen:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Susan Marie Groppi:

  I think a lot of people might be misunderstanding the outrage here — it's not just about what happened to Connie at the Hugos. It's about what's been happening to women in this community for a long time now. Pretty much every woman I know has a story of being on the wrong end of exactly that kind of inappropriate behavior. Taken individually, each incident is just a thing you brush off and move past, in the aggregate they add up to a big goddamn mess.

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/30)

• Harry Turtledove:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Meghan McCarron:

  And will this be the only time we talk about behaviors like this? And will we just talk about the most visible, shocking examples, or will we dig down into why their is an environment in our genre and at our conventions where this seems acceptable? ... I've seen variations of 'dirty old man' thrown around a lot in these discussions, but when those dirty old men are gone, I'm not exactly confident that women in the genre will no longer be treated in ways designed to make them feel like objects.

  (“On Harlangate, briefly,” 2006/08/31)

• Elizabeth Bear:

  What we are witnessing is the dying convulsion of a certain kind of privilege. And as in any case where somebody is having an unfair advantage taken away, many of the ones who have come to rely on that advantage are pretty upset about it, and are going to be bitter about lost dominance.

  It may take about a hundred years to change society. But no matter how angry many of us are that men will still attempt to assert social and sexual dominance over women in a crude and obvious fashion, the fact of the matter is that a sea-change is underway. And every time somebody says "Hey, that is not okay," and other people back him or her up, we get a little closer to equality.

  (“What we are witnessing,” 2006/09/01)

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For my own part: This is just not cool. It’s not “not cool if” (as in, not cool if Connie wasn't in on the gag); it’s not “not cool because” (as in, not cool because Harlan has a history of bad behavior); it’s just fundamentally not cool.

And the fact that so many people have rushed to defend it, or minimize it, or attack the people who’ve called bullshit on it, says more about the unreconstructed state of our field than the original incident.

And that is what’s gotta change.

Comments (195)

September 2, 2006

As of today, my access to SFF.net has been suspended for wilful violation of the member policies. The administrators of SFF.net are, of course, entirely within their rights to do this (and, really, given that the policy is there, I would expect responsible administrators to do no less). I won’t say that I had the policy in front of me when I violated it, but I knew that if I posted those quotes something like this was a likely consequence.

As I said yesterday, I did not post those quotes lightly. This is not just another internet slapfight.

Comments (56)

August 14, 2006

Figure 1. Some of the logos have changed. And I’m sure I’ve missed a couple. But it’s a start.

(b3co.com. Via all sorts of people.)

Comments (2)

August 6, 2006

So, as you might have guessed, last weekend I bopped down to Paris. Because that’s the sort of thing you can do here.

This was my first trip to Paris since I was about three feet tall, and all I can remember from that trip is that it was cloudy and we couldn’t go any higher than the second level of the Eiffel Tower. This time, there wasn’t much point in trying to fit the Complete Paris Experience into twenty-four hours; I figured if I managed to intercept Jeff and Ann VanderMeer in the middle of Jeff’s European tour and maybe hit the Musée des Arts et Métiers — in honor of my teenage obsession with Foucault’s Pendulum (the book, that is) — I’d be doing okay.

Result: success!

Not only were the VanderMeers cool people to meet, at long last — the best we’d managed to date was forty seconds in a WFC elevator — they were great people to wander around Paris with, drink with, and generally hang out with.

I got in around 2:00 Saturday afternoon. Being me, I decided to walk from the Gare de l’Est to my hotel over by L’Opéra. On the map it’s pretty straightforward, but, being me, I only memorized about half the street names, and I overestimated my sense of direction by about 90 degrees, so it took me about an hour longer than it should have. But if I hadn’t, I never would have got to see three dead rats hanging in a window.

But if you want to see them, you’ll have to continue on, below the jump . . .

(Continued)

Comments (6)

July 30, 2006

Comments (4)

July 26, 2006

Update: Something tells me that nobody is going to want to talk about anything but what I say about superheroes.

Maybe I can’t make it to Susan’s birthday party, but at least I can answer a few questions. (This will all be on the test, so pay attention!)

1. Robots or superheroes?

   It pains me to say this, but . . . robots.

   I’m too much the postmodernist now not to want to turn things over to see what crawls in the shade of their dark undersides. (My enjoyment of too many fantasy stories, for instance, is now marred by the antidemocratic subtext of any story that involves placing the “rightful” king on the throne.)

   And as much as I enjoy the four-color craziness of the Golden Age and applaud the bright-eyed enthusiasm of Siegel and Schuster, I can’t forget that “superheroes” also means Steve Ditko and Frank Miller and Mike Grell. It’s Mr. A and Rorschach and Women in Refrigerators Syndrome.

   It’s the underlying assumption that civil society is a failure, that to be a suspect is to be a criminal, that “extraordinary rendition” is the only road to justice. It’s an ugly world and it’s not the world I live in.

   If it was just that some superheroes were written that way, that would be one thing, but as it is, I think it’s the only way superheroes actually make sense, and guys like Ditko and Miller and Grell are just more up-front about it.

   I haven’t yet found an inescapable ruinous subtext for robots, so: robots.

2. What did you like best about Oxford?

   The sense of history, I think. Not just that the university was anywhere up to nine hundred years old, but that when I worked on the papers for my courses on colonial Indian history, I did it in a building constructed in the 1880s as a training center for the Indian Civil Service. And that I was preceded at the the college I attended by both John le Carré and Dr. Seuss.

   (Plus, getting my master’s from a world-class university finally erased the shame of the grades I got my junior year of high school.)

3. The Arbitrary Fortune Fairy gives you five thousand dollars, but you have to spend it in the next 72 hours. What do you spend it on?

   If I’d responded to this in a timely manner, the answer to this would have been obvious: fly to Vegas for the aforementioned birthday party.

   As it is, the answer would probably still involve plane tickets in some way, but possibly also more prosaic things, like buying a television. Or maybe I'd fly to Florida for a long weekend, get myself a motorcycle license, and spend whatever was left on a used Ducati.

   (Still, I’d be regretting Vegas.)

4. I’m not a fan of those “if you could live in any past time or place” questions, so I’m not going to ask that. But I am going to ask this: if you could bring the dominant clothing style from any past time or place back into fashion, what would it be?

   I won’t presume to speak for women’s fashion (though, in passing, I’ll note that I’m partial to the Twenties and Thirties), but for men’s, it would be some era in which hats were worn and suits had waistcoats and more than three buttons. Like, say, this one.

5. Which author, living or dead, would you most like to be favorably compared to?

   John le Carré. Particularly, John le Carré any time from Tinker, Tailor to A Perfect Spy, but I’d settle for the John le Carré of any era.

Extra credit

Almost two and a half years ago, Gwenda asked me five questions, too. I wrote three answers, got stuck, and never posted any of them. So, long overdue:

1. If you could be any font, which would you be and why?

   Caslon. Classic but not antiquarian, elegant but understated; deceptively readable, but capable of cloaking with apparent respectability the most radical sentiments.

2. Why zeppelins?

   It’s a class thing, I think — that nostalgia for an age in which air travel was a luxury available only to the leisured wealthy is of a piece, I'm sure, with the nostalgia for ocean liners, railways, Edwardian shooting parties. For more proximate causes, Michael Moorcock and his Oswald Bastable stories (which, it should be noted, make airships into instrument of colonial liberation struggle and anarchist revolution) and then to Hayao Miyazaki, with his floating castles and ominous flying battleships and daring air pirates.

3. What thing/person/situation that you’ve encountered in a foreign country struck you as strangest at the time?

   Coming out of the Bahnhof Lichtenberg onto the streets of East Berlin after a week and a half in the then-Soviet Union, starving and culture-shocked, only to hear the familiar melody of “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega.

4. Did you have access to a well-stocked library, home or outside-the-home, as a kid? If so, what was it like? If not, what kind of books did you generally have access to?

   Oh, yeah. I grew up in a house (well, several houses, in sequence) full of books. History, archaeology, classics, mysteries, SF, contemporary fiction and gonzo journalism, architecture, cartoons, you name it.

5. What is the most lost you’ve ever been?

   You know, I don't get lost much. Or maybe I do, but I don't realize that's what it is. But the most disoriented I've been was boarding a Tokyo subway and finding on it a map that bore no apparent relation to the one I was familiar with. It took me quite some panicked moments to figure out that they did actually connect up in a couple of places, and what I was seeing was not the map of Bizarro Tokyo but of the interlocking private system that takes over some of the lines as in the southern suburbs.

Figure 1. Me as a font.

Comments (15)

July 25, 2006

My mother and her partner just took a road trip down to New Mexico to check out an Earthship: a passively-heated and -cooled, semi-subterranean off-the-grid house made largely out of used tires, glass bottles, and other recycled materials. You can see some photos here.

Figure 1. The bridge.

In the current hemisphere-wide heat wave, a life underground is starting to look pretty attractive . . .

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If you rewind to the beginning of the slideshow you’ll see some very Iain Banks pictures of Hoover Dam; or if you go forward a little you can see photos of the very same café where Kelly and I frantically tried to finish our Rio Hondo stories while Gavin watched the footie.

Comments (1)

July 24, 2006

Via William Gibson, Neomarxisme, a fascinating English-language blog about contemporary Japan. Some brief samples:

Politics:

Last Friday night, I saw a tiny left-wing demonstration in Shibuya, but the thing about people power is that the cast and crew actually show their faces, walk the walk as they talk the talk. And there were handicap people! And women! These ultra-nationalists hide behind machines, like Darth Vader. They could all be remote-controlled from some central base in Yamanashi, and we would never know.

Sorry to keep writing about the yakuza and the right-wing, but I keep running into them week after week. I guess I should just cower in fear like a good boy. God didn't make right-wing soundtrucks so we would question their impact on the political process. Unlike the rest of the world, trucks in Japan run on wa, not gasoline, so it is quite rude to be too inquisitive about the internal combustion process.

— Right-Wing Parad(is)e

Pop culture:

One of the key presuppositions of this blog is, "For the last five years, Japanese mainstream pop culture has gotten progressively more boring and less stimulating," to which many answer:

1. Yes! The innovation and spark of the 90s is gone!
2. No! Your head is stuck in the past and you are missing the stunning glory of today!
3. No! You are deluded and have no idea what is actually going on!
4. No! You are looking in the wrong fields. Culture is not just music and street fashion!
5. No! You are a hater!

Every month or so, I start toying with ideas 2-5 and ask my Japanese friends to fill me in on everything I am missing. They never come up with much of anything: they either shrug in resigned apathy or call me later on my cellphone to announce that they are so bored with things that they don’t leave the house and I have been talking to thin air the entire time.

— Now I Understand Why Contemporary Japanese Pop Culture is at a Nadir

Politics, pop culture, and porn:

Even during the “Sex Boom” of the 80s, female university students still held a strong position in the collective libido, but now they were on late-night TV, bouncing around in bikinis and skimpy outfits. Following soon after that, the Onyanko Club lowered the bar by shifting desires to average-looking high school girls singing suggestive songs. A decade later in the mid-90s, the enjokousai (compensated dating) boom revealed to the public that old men would pay a lot of cash to have sex with middle school girls.

Sociologists and critics have proffered a lot of explanations over the years for the falling age of Japanese men’s sexual preferences, most notably that rising educational opportunities for women increased their intellectual maturity above the level desired by most Japanese men. In order to procure mental inferiors, men had to keep slinking down the food chain. . . .

So, now we have arrived upon the symbol of our own post-post-modern era — Saaya Irie — the busty twelve year-old slowly becoming a household name.

. . . The appreciation of most porn in Japan essentially comes from a type of misogyny — a belief in a cosmic order that determines women to be objects formed for the sole mission of male pleasure. The same graying bigwigs who prevented the birth control pill from gaining legal status in Japan for thirty years are the ones who would gnaw off an arm before any government body takes away their rights to paid sex and dirty videos. The powers-that-be would have no tiff with Saaya Irie.

— What to do about Saaya Irie?

Well worth checking out, whether you’re a Japanophile (I’m looking at you, Barzak!), an ex-Japanophile, or just an armchair cultural anthropologist.

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July 4, 2006

I don’t care! I’ve got the new Ditty Bops album! God bless you, Steve Jobs!

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Update: These girls were born to cover “Bye Bye Love.”

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June 30, 2006

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June 29, 2006

You are turning me into a night person. With a day job.

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“. . . but the undertaking was impossible from the very beginning and of all the impossible ways of carrying it out, this was the least interesting.”

— Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

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June 28, 2006

— and I didn’t put this in the title because I don’t mean it literally and I didn’t want to scare anybody — that maybe that “Screwfly Solution” dream was prophetic. (And before you freak out, it was a dream about the story, not a dream of the story.) No, I haven’t been having sudden irrepressible urges to rape and kill, and no I don’t think I’ve noticed any uptick in the global rate of other guys having them, either.

Like I said, I don’t mean it literally.

But if somebody was to present me with evidence that in a more general way, some sort of space alien terror weapon was fucking with our collective emotional state . . . let’s just say I wouldn’t be entirely suprised.

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June 27, 2006

Unbelievable thunderstorms here from some time before two this morning till some time after three, or maybe it was some time after four. Seriously, you should have seen, heard, smelled this thing, it was tropical.

When I woke up it was out of a dream of working on the William James steampunk adventure novel that I’m half-convinced Susan and I need to write some day. Only in the dream version of the novel, Louis Agassiz was being carted around in a big glass fishtank full of dirty water like a Guild Steersman from Dune. And I remember thinking “Uh-oh; this is one of those ‘gun on the mantlepiece’ things, isn’t it? Guy living in fishtank + Amazon expedition = we’re going to have to write a scene were somebody kills Agassiz by dumping a load of piranhas into the tank, aren’t we?”

(And now you know where I get my ideas.)

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P.S. No, Jeremy’s not crazy: when I first posted this there was an analogy about sleeping through the Blitz. But I decided the Agassiz story was more interesting.

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Not you guys! You’re totally my peeps, no question. These guys. (To clarify: that’s the people being talked about there, not the people doing the talking. Well, some of the people in the comments section are also not my people. But the “Brights,” definitely not my people. ’Cause I know some people who don’t believe what they believe who are pretty damn bright, and to not realize how bright those people are, you’d have to be pretty damn Dim.)

Next time I go to a mainstream SF convention, I’m getting myself a T-shirt that says FANS ARE NOT SLANS.

(And if I was less easygoing, I might get one that says JUST BECAUSE WE’RE BOTH ATHEISTS DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE NOT A NARROW-MINDED BIGOT. But I’m usually not that confrontational. Maybe I just need one that says STEVEN JAY GOULD HAS A POSSE.)

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June 26, 2006

Okay, when three attractive, intelligent, and discerning women tell you the facial hair should go, it’s probably time for the facial hair to go.

Abstract art installation or not.

(And the rest of the skull?)

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June 25, 2006

Basel, late April through early June.

Figure 1. So that’s where they keep it.

Figure 1. May day.

Figure 1. Monsoon season.

Figure 1. This poster kills fascists.

Figure 1. Poor misunderstood Peter.

Figure 1. Striking fear into every heart in Germany, I’m sure.

Figure 1. Live Cup action.

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June 22, 2006

Memo to self: Just because you had an idea for a story in the middle of the night does not mean it’s a good idea to go googling “The Screwfly Solution” before breakfast.

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June 19, 2006

Back in Basel. Showered, shaved, clothed, and fed. Awake, for the moment, but I doubt it’ll last. More sometime after midnight, I suspect.

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Sitting in the Costa Coffee in good old Heathrow Terminal 4. Got about twenty minutes before they start boarding my flight to Zürich and the last airborne leg of my journey back from the desert. I recommend the Chicken & Bacon Club Feast, although it is not in fact a feast.

Apologies to anyone I didn’t call last week, or didn’t get through to. Thunderstorm came through a couple of days in, knocked out the one cell tower my Euro-phone would talk to, didn’t get fixed till right before we left. But my DSL modem did turn up right before I got on the road (broadband, bitches!) and I’ll be getting my Skype on soon as I get back to Basel.

New Mexico was a blast. Fabulous writers, fabulous scenery, fabulous food. (I particularly recommend Walter’s gumbo, Maureen’s vegetarian coconut shrimp, and Jay’s momos.) Opinion was divided on my story, but people seemed to like my tomato curry. (Maureen and I were the only cooks to leave no leftovers. We win!) Had possibly the best eight-dollar meal of my life at a little bar / grill / convenience store in Arroyo Seco: one styrofoam pint green chile stew, three perfectly fried chicken taquitos. Drank my share of Negra Modelo with lime and also Kameron Hurley’s since she wasn’t there and the beer was. Also, lemongrass ice cream is Da Bomb.

And the writers, did I mention the writers? Walter, Mikey, Howard, Maureen, Gavin, Kelly, Jay, Daniel, Paolo, Carrie, Nina, Ray, Ted — best critique group evar. I could feel myself getting smarter all week long.

And the scenery. God, I miss the desert already. And the mountains. They just don’t make ’em like that anywhere else.

I’m not supposed to be thinking about what I’m doing after Switzerland, but I hear there’s a lot of bioinformatics in Santa Fe.

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June 10, 2006

Didn’t drink at the airport. Did drink on the plane, a little. I think they put something in those airline Bacardi bottles that makes you sober up again fifteen minutes after you finish one. Did watch a scratchy tape of X-Men 2. (Airline version. Patrick Stewart: “Oh, my Gosh, William, what have you done?”) Did read Babel-17 and Empire Star. Did lose one of the little rubber thingies on my fancy Sony earphones. Didn’t sleep, much. Didn’t write, much.

Thought about drinking here at DFW but I’d probably miss my flight. Hoping that if I sleep from here to Albuquerque I might actually function for a few hours after I get in. Looking forward to a nice early jet-lag morning tomorrow.

P.S. Send more drunk emails.

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Not convinced, eh?

Me neither.

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Update: There’s a young guy here in the departure lounge with a rock festival T-shirt and a big glass of beer. Because that’s what you drink at 9:30 in the morning, I guess.

I can’t tell if that would be a good idea or a really bad idea.

Comments (2)

June 5, 2006

1. Jesus Christ, I am in such fucking denial.
2. Sleep, jetlag, writing, something about laundry
3. No, like, I didn’t leave the house yesterday. I just sat around writing email and watching Battlestar Galactica and eating Top Ramen.
4. Really, was it crazier than usual this year, or was it just me?
5. Alan “Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead” DeNiro is a god-damned genius.
6. You know, I really don’t want to be one of those apocryphal fans who has no contact with their fellow human beings outside the con scene. Even the WisCon scene. Maybe I should have gotten that Ph.D. after all. Or moved to New York.
7. Okay, half of Rio Hondo’s already sent out RTF copies of their stories. I really should get to work here.
8. DENIAL! God!
9. Love,
10. Scary Editor Moles

Comments (13)

June 3, 2006

So, as expected, my DSL modem apparently arrived, was found undeliverable, and was shipped back while I was at/around WisCon. They say they’re sending me another one. One hopes it will get here before I leave for Rio Hondo.

But! I think I finally figured out how to get my unnecessarily fancy computer to connect to the internet through my unnecessarily fancy cell phone. I’m sure it’ll be dog-slow, but at least now maybe I’ll be able to write email as well as read it. (The phone, by itself, will log into my Gmail account. The phone will display my mail, in postage-stamp sized chunks. The phone will let me laboriously thumb in a reply of up to 2000 characters. The phone will let me press the send button. The phone will then chew the reply up, spit it out, and laugh at me.)

Which is good, because the chairs in this internet café get kind of uncomfortable after the first three or four hours, and I’m always convinced that everybody over there wakes up and starts talking right after I shut down.

Comments (0)

May 31, 2006

1. Jesus Christ, I am so fucking jet-lagged.
2. Wasn’t I supposed to be writing something?
3. I got way less sleep this weekend than I ever did in college and still I was always the first one to crash.
4. No, really, I mean, like, twenty hours sleep in four days.
5. Worth it, though. If my brain would work all the time the way it was working on Sunday, I’d be almost half as smart as Chip Delany.
6. Also, I have the coolest friends on the planet. I have the coolest friends in human history. I just don’t have a rocket car.
7. Anyway: Intimacy or sex? (And don’t say both/and, ’cause, like, duh.)
8. If I wake up at 3AM and can’t get back to sleep there’s gonna be trouble.
9. Love,
10. Scary Editor Moles

(Love means never having to say you’re sorry to Meghan for stealing her idea. Right? I hope so.)

Comments (10)

May 30, 2006

My con report:

So there’s this kid, and he’s surrounded by candy, all his favorite kinds of candy. The kid is not eating the candy. Instead the kid is crying. The kid is crying because if he eats any one piece of candy, that means that at that moment, he’s not eating all the other pieces of candy.

In case there’s anyone I didn’t tell this to already, that was my weekend.

Also: I just dreamed that we all met up for a sort of PartyAtMyHouseCon in, I think it was supposed to be Kinshasa? And not a good neighborhood in Kinshasa. And even though it wasn’t the real Kinshasa, and even though I really want to see all you guys again, it didn’t seem like a very good idea. So, somewhere else, okay?

Plane to Dallas in four hours. Plane to Zürich forty minutes after it lands in Dallas. Ugh. Condolences to everyone who had plane trouble yesterday; I’ll try to get my fair share in today.

I’d settle for either a rocket car or a zeppelin, you know?

Missing you already —

— David aka Scary Editor Moles

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* Named for a Terry Pratchett character in, mm, think it was The Wee Free Men.

Comments (2)

May 22, 2006

Nothing like waking up sure you’ve totally overslept and finding it’s still five minutes to six a.m.

Comments (0)

May 19, 2006

Which Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Are You?

You are Rule 8, the most laid back of all the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. While your forefather in the Federal Rules may have been a stickler for details and particularity, you have clearly rebelled by being pleasant and easy-going. Rule 8 only requires that a plaintiff provide a short and plain statement of a claim on which a court can grant relief. While there is much to be lauded in your approach, your good nature sometimes gets you in trouble, and you often have to rely on your good friend, Rule 56, to bail you out.

(Via Patrick.)

Comments (0)

May 17, 2006

Figure 1. Technology, schmechnology.

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May 13, 2006

The nameless dread thing? Figured it out. My problem, not yours. Never mind.

Comments (2)

May 12, 2006

Why do I suddenly feel like something awful is about to happen and I’ve forgotten to prepare for it? (And why am I asking you when hardly any of you are awake?)

Comments (8)

April 23, 2006

So Saturday Thursday [Saturday? What? — ed.] evening I caught the overnight train to Florence. Because this is Europe and you can do stuff like that here.

Figure 1. What I woke up to: the Bologna train station. Now you know where baloney comes from.

Figure 2. The view from the train. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that Italy looks a lot like Mendocino County.

And also because my friend Fran and her family had flown over from the States and rented a Tuscan farmhouse for the week. I hadn’t been able to get in touch with Fran since I’d figured out the train schedule — the best I’d been able to do was send a fax c/o the owners of the farmhouse, something like “I ought to make it to Montevarchi about nineish” — but I figured with a fair bit of Spanish and a little Latin, I could manage Italy on my own if I had to.

Figure 3. Firenze S.M.N. I don’t know if this was really the longest train platform I’d ever walked down, but I was glad I didn’t have much luggage.

Figure 4. It’s kind of like Penn Station, only without that whole freaky troglodyte cave thing.

The overnight train was about 45 minutes late, but because Europe is a civilized society I had half a dozen local train choices and made it to Montevarchi right on schedule. (I did have to pay an extra five euros on the train because I hadn’t figured out I needed to get my ticket stamped, but I’ve learned plenty more expensive lessons than that.)

Fran and her dad John met me at the train station just as if we’d planned the whole thing, and we drove up to the farmhouse. Fran’s mom, Linda, and her sister Jenny made breakfast. We sat on the front porch eating frittata and toast and fruit and drinking Sienese coffee and watching the fog burn off.

Figure 5. Nothing but rolling hills covered with grapevines and olive trees — I don’t know how Fran and her folks put up with this for a whole week.

Figure 6. I think Italy gets a better grade of sunlight than Switzerland.

The house they’d rented was one of half a dozen or so on the grounds of the Fattoria Petrolo, a working winery and olive farm that was at least a couple of hundred years old. After breakfast Fran and John and I hiked up to the office so John could get on line and try to find them a hotel room for their last two nights. (As it turned out, on line didn’t work — booked solid, or so they claimed — but accepting the Petrolo folks’ offer of phoning the hotel and being Italian at them worked fine.)

Figure 7. The road up to the main villa. Look at those flowers — you’d almost think it was spring, or something.

Figure 8. I figured it wasn’t fair just to take pictures of the back of Fran’s head.

While John was dealing with that, Fran and I went on over the hill to look at the rest of the Fattoria.

Figure 9. Looking from the main villa down toward the church.

Figure 10. The church.

Figure 11. I was trying to take a picture of the tower up on the top of the hill, but my phone doesn’t have a zoom lens.

Figure 12. Looking back toward the main villa.

Figure 13. And again.

We went back to the villa and cleaned up, and then Fran and John and Tony (Jenny’s husband) and I went wine tasting while Linda and Jenny and Jenny’s nearly-two-year-old daughter Josephine went into town.

The first winery we hit was only just open — the kid who ran the place (I say kid, but he was probably thirty) had to run up the road ahead of us and drop the chain between the gates, and he couldn’t find his corkscrew till Fran pointed out that it was sitting next to the sink where he’d just rinsed out four glasses for us.

Figure 14. I have a bad habit of photographing buildings and machinery instead of people. I’m trying to work on it. (Cool tractor, though, ain’t it?)

He’d just bottled the wine on Monday. Considering that, and that it was mostly Merlot, it wasn’t half bad — simple but drinkable. And only six euros a bottle. John and Fran both thought it was the sort of thing Linda would like, and John bought three bottles.

(Full disclosure: I was bored with Merlot long before Sideways. I never even saw Sideways. If you like Merlot, please drink it, and if anybody gives you crap about it, let me know so I can smack ’em for you.)

The next winery, I wasn’t clever enough to take any pictures of. It was a little more established, and the wine was a little more expensive — eight euros — but it was good stuff; mostly Sangiovese, with a bit of a couple of other varietals none of us had ever heard of. John bought two bottles and I brought one back for myself.

Then we kept going up over the hills toward Chianti proper, but we didn’t make it that far. The thing about traveling with Fran is, she works for the California Culinary Academy, and her job is arranging student internships. So when you’re with Fran it can be hard to throw a rock without hitting a five-star restaurant where she knows the chef and two or three of the chef’s student assistants.

In this case we didn’t have to throw a rock; we just happened on the sign for Badia a Coltibuono, a winery, restaurant, and B&B on the grounds of a converted monastery. Fran just wanted to stop and say hi, but once we made it as far as the restaurant it was hard to pass up lunch. I had an aubergine purée with sheeps-cheese gelato followed by pork chops with . . . well, damn if I can remember, but it was good.

Figure 15. Badia a Coltibuono. Did I photograph the part of the monastery with the restaurant in it, where we actually were? No I did not. On the other hand, there’s this great church tower.

Chianti’s heraldic emblem is a black rooster. We asked Chef Paolo if he knew the story behind it, and he didn’t, so we spent a while trying to make one up — I think a plague of weevils was involved somewhere — but after a little research he came back and told us that it was in memory of the rooster that alerted the Sienese to the approach of the Florentine army and saved Chianti from Florinese domination. (Which was suspiciously similar to John’s explanation of why the rooster was the emblem of Oporto in Portugal, but I suppose everywhere in Europe with a rooster for an emblem must have more or less the same story.)

Then I had some fruit flan with candied orange peel and pistachio sauce. And several bites of Fran’s chocolate torte. Plus we drank a couple of bottles of the estate’s Chianti Classico, since by that point it was pretty clear we weren’t going to make it to any more wineries.

Figure 16. Me, Fran, and Tony. Let’s try to figure out what kind of pictures my phonecam sucks at taking, and take those. But if you look closely you can see some barrels with that black rooster logo in the photographs on either side of my head.

We came back to the farmhouse and sat on the porch talking and drinking for four or five hours . . .

Figure 17. Linda, Jenny, Josie, Fran (a.k.a. “Auntie Beanie”) and Tony.

Figure 18. John, Jenny, Josie, Fran and Tony. The great thing about digital is that you can just take a hell of a lot of pictures instead of waiting for everybody to get settled.

Figure 19. John, Jenny, Linda, Josie, Tony, Fran. Getting a little closer to an actual family portrait.

Figure 20. Here we go.

Figure 21. Now let’s get me in there, courtesy of Linda. Josie’s wine is watered — yes, we’re giving a two-year-old her own glass of wine; can you tell we’re in Europe? — but she’s still more interested in it than in being photographed.

Figure 22. Okay, now everyone’s looking at the camera, except Tony. This is either just before or just after I managed to spill that glass of wine on Jenny and Fran simultaneously.

. . . after which Linda cooked up a feast every bit as satisfying as lunch, if simpler: lamb, chicken, pork, salad, risotto, pasta — it was their last night at the farmhouse, so there was a fridge to empty out.

Then we opened a couple more bottles of wine and sat and drank and talked some more while the sun went down and the stars came out.

Figure 23. Evening in Tuscany. Again: How could anyone put up with this?

It’s a difficult life.

The next morning, early, John took one of the rental cars and took Jenny and Tony and Josephine to the Pisa airport. Fran and Linda and I packed up the other car and followed about an hour later.

Figure 24. Man, I’d hate to wake up to this every morning.

Figure 25. Another of my photographic weaknesses, besides buildings and machines, is pictures taken through windows.

Figure 26. It didn’t really look much like this, but you take a picture straight into the sun with no filter, you don’t expect much.

I’d been a bit irritated, when I made my train reservations back in Basel, that I hadn’t been able to get a direct return train from Florence, and was going to have to change trains in Milan. But again things worked out just as if we’d planned the whole thing: Fran and John and Linda were headed in that direction anyway, and since my train from Milan didn’t leave till five, we had plenty of time.

When Linda said that I ought to get a look at the Leaning Tower while I was here, I kind of figured we’d take a quick spin around it in the car, like Brandon and I did with the St. Louis Arch, and then get back on the autostrada. As far as I was concerned, I’d already had a fantastic trip, and I would have been able to go home contented.

But, like I said, we had plenty of time.

Figure 27. Getting out of the car in Pisa, two blocks from the Leaning Tower. This is the moment when I finally turned to Fran and whispered “Holy shit, I’m in fuckin’ Italy.”

Fran and I were going to climb the tower, but they only let so many people up in it at a time, and it would have been a good hour before we’d have been able to get a time slot.

Figure 28. You’ve been seeing pictures of it all your life. Those pictures, let me tell you, completely fail to capture the reality of standing in front of it. Which fact I will attempt to demonstrate by showing you yet another picture.

It’s probably just as well, since from the top of it I doubt I’d have been able to keep myself from phoning everyone I know in the States and saying “Yeah, I know it’s three in the morning where you are, but I’m standing on top of the goddamn Leaning Tower of Pisa.”

(At this point I should note that this was only my second trip to Italy ever, and that when I took the first one I was about three years old.)

Figure 29. It’s not just the tower. The baptistry, left, and the Duomo, right. Why the top of the baptistry looks like a medieval Chinese helmet I’m not really sure. But according to John it was the baptistry that was supposed to be the architectural star of the place. Show-off tower.

Figure 30. Again, it’s not just the tower — look at the last five arches on the lower left. See how they don’t line up? It’s really too bad they invented all this beautiful architecture before they invented geology and structural engineering.

So instead we just walked around the Piazza. Fran and I bought some postcards. They were selling all kinds of other stuff as well — from your normal touristy stuff, like Leaning Coffee Cups and Leaning Tower refrigerator magnets, to your abnormal touristy stuff, like bad imitation Japanese swords and Playboy Bunny t-shirts. Plus there were some African guys selling watches — I’m pretty sure I saw a Seiko I lost in Tokyo seven or eight years ago. But Fran just bought a tote bag for one of her coworkers back home, and her folks bought some non-leaning salt and pepper shakers. I stuck to postcards.

Figure 31. Fran and me: circumstantial evidence that we were actually there. By this point Linda was getting pretty good with the phonecam.

Then we had another pretty good lunch, at some little cafe that was between the Piazza and where we’d parked the car. And then we got back on the autostrada.

From Pisa we drove up along the coast to Genoa, and then north to Milan from there. I don’t remember where all we passed through — other than Carrara, where we drove past yards full of enough marble blocks to build a medium-sized pyramid — but it was beautiful. I wasn’t clever enough to take pictures of the drive, but if you’ve driven Highway 101 in California, it looked a lot like that. Like all different parts of 101, from Santa Barbara up to maybe Ukiah, but without the ten-lane suburban nightmare stretch from San Jose to San Francisco.

Actually, most of what I saw of the Italian countryside, from when I first woke up on Friday, somehwere north of Bologna, felt like one part of Northern California or another. It felt like home. Except that all the towns were Italian, with monasteries perched on the hilltops and terra-cotta apartment buildings in the valleys, but I could live with that.

I think I need to talk my new employers into opening an office in Tuscany.

They dropped me off at the central train station in Milan. Milan didn’t remind me of California; it was more like Madrid, tree-lined avenues with lots of big blocky buildings with iron balconies and painted shutters and graffitti from ground level as far up the walls as a hand and a spray can could reach. I didn’t get any pictures of that, either, but I did get some of Milan Centrale, a Mussolini-era monster that by weight, at least, must be one of the world’s larger train stations.

Figure 32. Milan Centrale. I’m not sure they have enough kiosks.

Figure 33. The Fascists, like the Nazis, clearly had what William Gibson called “a scary excess of design talent.”

Figure 34. Viva Roma Nova Eterna.

Figure 35. Germany has western pulps, Italy has Diabolik comic books. Tells you everything you need to know, really.

Figure 36. Yep, it’s a train station.

I bought a can of Chinotto and sat and read for an hour or so till my train pulled in.

Then it was back to Switzerland. Which suddenly seemed a lot less isolated and a lot easier not to take too seriously.

Viva Italia!

Comments (8)

April 20, 2006

I tried to Flickrize these, but I ran out of bandwidth, so you’ll have to settle for the low-res versions for now.

First, the neighborhood. So far the only notable landmark I’ve discovered is this place . . .

. . . which at first I thought was a Swiss Army officer candidate school, but which turned out to be . . .

. . . a Salvation Army officer candidate school.

Now, on to the apartment. The first thing you see when you come in is, of course, the bathroom.

Aside from the lack of storage space (a theme to be repeated), it’s a clear win over the bathroom at my place in Seattle. Note the orange shower curtain. Orange (hi, Greg) is also going to be a repeated theme here. There’s an orange-and-white bathmat, too but you can’t really see it in the picture.

Turn right to see the main bedroom. This picture was taken after they delivered everything except the one piece of furniture I really needed, namely the bed.

This is the first wardrobe I’ve ever owned. Coincidentally, this is the first place I’ve lived (and that includes the 20 m² rathole I rented on my first solo trip to Japan) with zero closet space.

Note that at least one, probably two, and possibly all three of the doors are upside down. By the time I’d assembled it that far, though, I already had one Band-Aid on my thumb from using the can opener on my Swiss Army knife as a screwdriver. Plus, I’d burned through more than half of the second season of Futurama, and I wasn’t going to go through the rest of it taking those doors off and putting them on again.

Bed! Delivered yesterday, at long last. Exactly the same model I had in the States, only this time I didn’t screw up and slice through some of the straps holding the slats in place. I was going to get something cheaper, but once I saw this one again in the showroom I decided a little breath of familiarity would go a long way toward making me feel at home. Anyway, the frame wasn’t much of the overall cost and the cheaper mattresses all sucked.

Note the sheets, pillowcases and whatnot. This is how the orange thing got started. What can I say, it was dark, cold, and wet when I bought them, and Manor was having its Blaxploitation “Feel Africa” sale:

The sale runs through the end of the month, so after my next paycheck I’m definitely going back for more orange stuff. (Actual plates, for instance — eating off paper is entertaining for a little while, but it gets old. Besides, right now I’m not getting any mileage out of my dishwasher.)

The view from the bedroom’s balcony. When the weather warms up I’m going to get a little table and a couple of chairs for it. And a pitcher of margaritas.

Leaving the bedroom, or turning left from the front door, we have the living room. Was I smart enough to take a picture from an angle that would make narrative sense? No.

Instead we get this angle. That’s the door we came through to the left of the bookshelf, with the umbrella on the doorknob and the coat hanging from the back. Not a lot of books on the shelf yet, but I’m working on it. The other door leads to the guest bedroom.

There’s nothing orange in here yet, unless you count the orange logo on the Coop bag, but I’ll fix that before too long.

And another angle on the living room, this one taken from the kitchen and showing off my fancy metal-and-glass coffee table and my fancy cheap-ass chair that’s supposed to tide me over till I get a couch. (Note also the printer on the kitchen table — both power outlets and flat surfaces are in kind of short supply at the moment.)

If I stick my head out the living room window, I can see this clock. Don’t know what the building is, but the clock’s surprisingly handy. Not only can you set your watch by it, it rings out every quarter-hour (one ring on the :15, two on the :30, three on the :45, four on the hour) and tolls the hour. Kind of nice to be lying in bed and know that it’s only three AM without having to get up and look at a clock.

The kitchen! No garbage disposal, of course, but everything else — you can see the dishwasher peeking in to the right of the sink. Had a bad moment when I thought the oven was busted, but then I found the circuit breakers. Note again the printer. (Having my own printer again is almost as exciting as having my own bed.)

My enormous refrigerator. (Well, enormous compared to the tiny dorm fridge in the company flat. And while I’m sure it’s significantly smaller than the one I had in Seattle, it feels like there’s at least as much usable space. I think having it more or less at eye level — freezer underneath — is a nice touch.) Note the emphasis on packaged foods — kind of unavoidable when I haven’t got any pots or pans yet.

Now, leaving the kitchen and crossing the living room (hopefully remembering to close the refrigerator door), last but not least, we have the guest bedroom:

Okay, maybe it is least. But by the time you come visit there ought to be a desk and some more bookshelves and maybe even a guest bed. Also by then I ought to have gotten rid of this junk:

Actually, there’s even more junk now, since that was taken before I started in on the bed. But I’ll get it cleaned up — honest.

Finally, in case there was any doubt as to where all that furniture was coming from:

Comments (7)

April 17, 2006

Or, Kameron Hurley is a genius.

I’ve been trying to articulate this thought myself for quite some time:

I don’t believe people live without friendship, without laughter, without any joy in their lives. Women who’ve had cliterodectimies do, in fact, still have a sense of humor and take joy (or not) in their children (maybe they take joy in flowers instead. Or making pottery. Or whatever). Even slaves dance. Abused women have been known to sing.

It’s important to remember that.

And not just when you’re reading Touched by Venom.

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So, the reason that I haven’t been posting much about the whole Swiss thing, the last two or three weeks, is that I’ve been increasingly stressed out over still being stuck in a company-rented studio after more than a month—not that there’s anything wrong with it, but last weekend I calculated that (figuring from when I left Seattle), I’d been on the road, living out of a suitcase, for seventy days. I’m not sure whether that’s a record for me or not—the time, when I was fourteen, between when my family left San Diego and when we found a house in Tokyo must have been almost as long, if not longer—but the inability to completely unpack or completely relax, the slight but undeniable conditionality of any privacy I might have, was really starting to get to me. I had a couple of weekends here and there where I decided I wasn’t really up for anything but sitting on the couch playing video games, and at least one Sunday where I never left the studio or even got out of my bathrobe, but it’s only in the last week or two that the idea I should have moved to New York or LA or Tokyo has (however briefly) crossed my mind, or that I had to remind myself that Switzerland Is Not The Enemy.

(It’s nothing, really; not even as bad as I expected it to be before I came over. You should have seen what I thought of Tokyo that first year. But I destroyed those notebooks, so you can’t.)

But! All that’s over now. (And just in time, since someone else was expecting to move into the company studio Sunday.) I have an apartment.

Figure 1. The top balcony’s mine. And no, the building next door doesn’t actually curve like that.

Figure 1. Floor plan. Both of these pictures stolen from the real estate listing site, since apparently the cable for my digital camera wasn’t in my bag like I thought it was. More later.

The address, for those interested in such things: Hagentalerstrasse 15, CH-4055 Basel, Switzerland. (Apparently apartment numbers aren’t used here—perhaps because that would encourage having one’s mail delivered even when one hasn’t made one’s name known to the building owners. Those following along at home will also note the use of ‘ss’ instead of ‘ß’. You think that’s odd, you should see the way they spell actual Swiss German.)

Anyhow: I haven’t really slept in my own bed yet, since IKEA managed somehow to deliver some important parts of it—like the mattress—to someone else and say they can’t get me a replacement till Wednesday morning. (I picked up a sort of minimal futon for 30 francs to use in the interim.) And I don’t have a couch since I used up most of my furniture budget for this month on the bed.

But I have an apartment! So I guess I’m staying.

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March 26, 2006

Figure 1. I hear you.

Figure 2. If we stay very still perhaps they’ll go away.

Comments (2)

March 23, 2006

With my shiny new Swiss Nokia I’ve finally joined Generation Cameraphone, and can now inflict even more pictures on the Intarwebs.

Figure 1. Grossbasel’s heraldic beast.

Figure 2. Kleinbasel’s heraldic giant.

Comments (3)

March 21, 2006

Still no apartment. Looked at another place yesterday evening, a shiny new two-bedroom that I liked quite a bit. Unfortunately the people living in it aren’t actually planning to get out till July. Doubly unfortunately, I liked it enough that I’m not sure I could be satisfied now with the place I looked at on Friday. But there’s plenty more where that came from.

On the other hand, I got paid today! Sorta. I haven’t got a bank account yet — applied online for a Post Office account (yes, the Post Office is a bank here, more or less — another clue that Switzerland and Japan are closely related) after discovering the ridiculous (by U. ‘Free Steak Knives With Checking Account’ S. standards) fees charged by the likes of UBS, but probably won’t actually have an account for a couple of weeks. So instead of a paycheck I got an advance of as much cash as I felt safe carrying — a few days’ pay, enough to get me through that couple of weeks in terms of groceries and pocket money.

It all feels weirdly 19th-century, but I guess that’s sort of the point of moving to Europe, isn’t it?

Now I’ve stayed at work way too late, and it’s time to blow my wage packet on curry and beer.

Comments (3)

March 17, 2006

And Cat and Girl meet it in rare form.

Meanwhile: I looked at my first apartment this morning. Aside from the bedroom floor being linoleum (I mean, I know it was built in the 80s, but really, who thought that up? Bert?) it wasn’t bad. One bedroom, living room, a small dining area attached to the kitchen (2.5 zimmer, as they say here, or 2DK, as they would have said in Japan.) A little bigger than my place in Seattle. High ceilings, parquet floors (except in the bedroom), lots of light — southeast-facing windows with nothing across the street, which is exactly what I would have wanted. Not far from the main train station, only a couple of blocks from the cinema district. (Birsigstrasse 12, Ben, if you’re curious.) Indoor bicycle parking. And the caretaker’s an Aussie, which might make life easier. Anyway, I’ve got two or three more places to look at next week, but if I ended up taking this one it wouldn’t be too bad.

Comments (3)

March 15, 2006

There’s some fascinating stuff going on over at Ben’s place, spinning off from the religion conversations over at Hal’s; fascinating, anyway, if you’re into questions like what shapes a worldview, and what holds a culture together.

In response to Ben, Vardibidian writes . . .

I’ve whinged before about how my fundamental understanding of the Jews boils down to we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. And I will still say that, because it’s true, and it’s true to myself the way I understand it. And that story is part of both Judaism and Christianity. But it’s also true, as Mr. Rosenbaum points out, that you could boil the story of the Jews down to the Temple was destroyed, so we wrote the siddur.

. . . and then goes on (back in Ben’s comment section) to unpack that a bit, to talk about “the core story, the story we cling to that provides the frame for everything else.”

( . . . which is the part that, me being a writer trying to pin down some characters, strikes me as a tremendously useful concept, whether you personally think it’s valid or not. But anyway.)

In the course of the discussion, V more or less freely interchanges two concepts (emphasis added):

I don’t want to lose any of our stories. But they aren’t all the core story, they aren’t all how the universe really is.

Ultimately, there’s tremendous power in single sentences, in the moral at the end of the story, in reduction. Ultimately, there’s tremendous power in being able to say, briefly and simply, who you are.

So, my question: If those are the same thing, what does that mean? And if those aren’t the same thing, what does that mean? And does how you answer that depend on which of them you take as your starting point of view?

(For the record, my core story, articulated more or less on the spur of the moment: All this, just with brains evolved for the use of small tribes of African plains apes? Freeeow! Which, if you think about it, does say something both about who I am and about how the universe really is — for some values of really and is.)

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March 7, 2006

For those of you wondering what Basel looks like: A lot of the time it looks like this.

Figure 1. The Rathaus, Marktplatz, Basel.

On the other hand, there’s the way it looked yesterday evening.

Figure 2. A selection of revelers.

Fasnacht started yesterday, at some God-awful hour, with giant lanterns and whatnot, which I missed on account of having gone to bed a couple of hours earlier, but by the time I dragged myself out, it was still . . . well . . . something.

Figure 3. A couple of Guggemusik bands. Much more entertaining to listen to than the piccolo players. Glowing eyes are apparently de rigeur.

Figure 4. ¡Cuidado! ¡Llamas! (With piccolos and, it would appear, tracheotomies.)

(More later.)

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Contrary to earlier indications, Maureen McHugh’s cancer is not, in fact, back from the dead.

Go Maureen! You rock.

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March 1, 2006

Figure 1. How I feel.

(Image, and sentiment, shamelessly stolen from John Holbo. But it’s too good to pass up.)

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Arrived safely in Basel yesterday. Everything’s going swimmingly so far. I’ll try to post some pictures this evening.*

They have snow here.

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* The system administrators at my new job are clever enough to keep me from logging into discontent or chrononaut, so if you’ve sent me email since Sunday evening I probably haven’t seen it. chronodm @ gmail.com works, though. I’ll look for some wi-fi tonight.

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Update: Hi, everybody! Could’t find a working wi-fi hotspot last night, so, no pictures yet. I’ll keep looking. If it comes down to it, I should be able to upload them from MoveableType, if I can get them off my Mac and onto my work PC.

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February 23, 2006

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February 16, 2006

Hey, folks. In Florida. Still a little sick — I’m hoping that the reappearance of the sore throat on the day after I finished my course of antibiotics doesn’t mean anything. Cough’s a lot better, though. Got word from Basel that my work permit’s come through, so with a little luck the visa won’t be far behind and I won’t have to expensively rearrange my travel schedule at short notice.

Bad news is I don’t think I’m going to be able to make a road trip out of Jacksonville-Chicago, which means no Kentucky and no Ohio this year. Very bummed. But until the Authorization To Issue Visa actually turns up I have to assume that it’s going to come down to the wire, and even after it does there’s bound to be some hijinks involved in getting my actual passport stamped with an actual visa and returned to me before I leave. (Jon, I’m hoping that’s something I can take care of in person at the consulate in Atlanta . . . if so, maybe dinner? Wish I had an actual timetable.)

Good news is that my stuff arrived from Seattle and almost all of it was not visibly damaged. Now I just have to figure out how much of it is actually coming to Switzerland and how I’m going to get it there . . .

I know I owe email and phone calls to several of you. I think I’ve finally figured out how to get more than one computer to talk to my dad’s cable modem, so maybe I can catch up on that in the next day or two. (And maybe if I’m feeling a little better I can stop falling asleep before those of you on the Left Coast get home from work . . .)

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P.S. Not having a day job is really cutting into my web surfing.

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February 13, 2006

The road seems to have stopped moving, so I must be in Jacksonville.

• Days on road: 19
• Miles traversed: 4500 (approx.)
• State lines crossed: 13
• Margaritas drunk: 10
• (Truly awful margaritas drunk: 2)
• Cough drops consumed: 100+
• Tissues consumed: 300+
• Doses amoxycillin taken: 30
• Bottles of cheap Austrian vodka used primarily as mouthwash: 1
• Introductory creative writing classes taught: 0.75
• Museums visited: 2
• Hot tubs relaxed in: 1
• Tolls, in clear violation of my God-given rights as a Californian, paid to the Kansas Turnpike Authority: 1
• Perennially incomplete cities of the future visited: 1
• Readings from the works of dubious French visionaries listened to: 1

I’m sure there’s more, but it’s all a bit of a blur. Just waiting for the paperwork now, my schedule at the mercy of the Swiss authorities. It’s way too cold, for Florida.

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February 3, 2006

My former employer tells me they haven’t yet taken me off the insurance rolls and for a measly $300-something I can stay on for another month. God bless America.

Meanwhile, after explaining to three different office types that I’m not in fact asking any of their physicians to take on a new patient, and dropping the name of Blue Cross repeatedly, I have an appointment at 10:30 CST with a nurse practitioner. God bless America.

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Update: (Dateline, Memphis.) Well, I got a prescription for some cheap antibiotics and an assurance that I don’t have pneumonia and an admonition to have my blood pressure checked out and a suggestion that I take to my bed for a couple of days. Was feeling reasonably okay (by recent standards) a couple of hours ago, but either I talked too much today or spicy Chinese food for dinner wasn’t as good an idea as it sounded, because while the cough’s abated considerably, the sore throat’s back with a vengeance. Come on, amoxycillin, inhibit those cell wall polymer chains!

Thanks for all the good wishes. I hope to be back with less self-absorbed self-pity before too long. Either that or I’ll move to LJ.

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February 2, 2006

Travelling. Got a cold. More later.

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Update: Took Greg and Lisa’s advice and decided to hole up in Tempe an extra day. I don’t know what I’ve got, but man does it suck.

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Update: About a day behind schedule, crashed in a Days Inn in Hays, KS. Trying to sleep sitting up so the glop stays put. Can’t seem to manage more than about forty-five minutes at a stretch. No health insurance. Boy, do I wish I was a citizen of a civilized country.

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January 10, 2006

The Four Things finally cornered me, thanks to Rob. But like good old Artie Schopenhauer says:

If you observe that your opponent has taken up a line of argument which will end in your defeat, you must not allow him to carry it to its conclusion, but interrupt the course of the dispute in time, or break it off altogether, or lead him away from the subject, and bring him to others.

So I’m making up my own questions.

• Four jobs I’ve blown the interview for:
  1. Summer-camp model-building instructor
  2. Undergraduate writing tutor
  3. Technical writer
  4. Software engineer
• Four movies I’ve watched one time more than was good for me:
  1. Lone Star
  2. Miller’s Crossing
  3. The Lion in Winter
  4. Apocalypse Now: Redux
• Four places I’ve never gone back to:
  1. Athens
  2. Tehran
  3. Capitola
  4. Oxford
• Four other places I’ve never gone back to:
  1. Crete
  2. Isfahan
  3. Reno
  4. Cornwall
• Four TV shows I never watched:
  1. Friends
  2. Seinfeld
  3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  4. The Sopranos
• Four web sites I stopped visiting:
  1. C|Net
  2. Slashdot
  3. Locusmag.com
  4. the Washington Post
• Four serious culinary mistakes:
  1. Toblerone fondue à la micro-onde
  2. Lipton’s onion soup with Cheerios
  3. Pan-fried refrigerator cookies
  4. Spaghetti alla carbonara with lukewarm spaghetti
• Four places I wonder if I’ll ever get to:
  1. Olduvai Gorge
  2. Samarkand
  3. Manaus
  4. Darwin
• Four albums I used to really like that I don’t really ever need to hear again:
  1. The Police, Every Breath You Take: The Singles
  2. The Police, Sychronicity
  3. Sting, Dream of the Blue Turtles
  4. Sting, . . . well, pretty much anything, really

Tag! . . . er, who hasn’t done this yet?

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January 9, 2006

“Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results,” sayeth the Onion.

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January 4, 2006

Five years later . . .

As some of you know, for some time now, but particularly since a week or two before World Fantasy, the charming and persusasive Mr. Rosenbaum has been tirelessly working to entice me to follow his example and voyage to the land of Alps, cheese, chocolate, pocketknives, Calvinism, and Neutralitätspraxis. In mid-December these efforts culminated in a visit with the fine people at Genedata AG.

There followed two weeks of soul-searching, several Talks with capital Ts, and a tiny bit of negotiation — darn that capitalism — while the box of books I’d optimistically ordered from Amazon.de back in early December finally arrived, and sat unopened on my desk and in the corner of my eye, following my every move with a reproachful gaze.

Today the box is opened!

And today I accepted Genedata’s offer.

In a couple of weeks I’ll be packing most of my earthly possessions off to my dad’s place in Florida, and following them out there in a crazy two-week road trip: south as far as LA, then east; left at Albuquerque (thanks, Bugs), or maybe Oklahoma City, to visit cousin Beth in the other Manhattan; stop off in Kansas City, and then down to visit Andy in Tuscaloosa (back row, first from left). A few days in Jacksonville to unwind, then away (I, demens, et saevas curre per Alpes), probably out of Chicago (motto: Close to Wiscon), maybe with a short side trip to Madison.

And then!

And then? Well, we’ll see. Six years ago my plan was to stop off in Seattle for a few weeks that summer while I worked on my master’s thesis.

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P.S.: Happy New Year!

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December 30, 2005

Figure 1. My happy bunny, or so they tell me.

Yeah, pretty much. Tune in next year and maybe I’ll be facing life with a little more zest.

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December 22, 2005

I’m in the middle of some crazy-stressful Big Decisions this month (full story after the New Year, probably) and a lot of stuff has fallen by the wayside. But Rowe’s note that Ikarie will be republishing “The Voluntary State” reminds me to mention that they’ll also be republishing “The Third Party.” Which will probably be easier to translate. So start practicing your Czech!

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December 13, 2005

Setting: A cavernous, cavernous café-bar, a block off Basel’s Marktplatz, bright indirect lighting in warm colors, trendy paneling in gray marble and corrugated aluminum, lots of white paint, tables and chairs and couches evoking a campus cafeteria by way of IKEA. Extras: Assorted Basilers, ages four months to forty — it’s a bimodal distribution, with a major peak around, say, twenty, and a minor peak around, say, two.

The protagonist sits at one of the institutional tables, his back to a large radiator, his things (sportcoat, overcoat, wool cap, briefcase, steno-style Moleskine, with Charles Darwin has a Posse sticker, laptop, also with Charles Darwin has a Posse sticker, shopping bag from the Läckerli-Huus) exploding over the table and two of the chairs. He’s a little overdressed, not just for the café-bar but for, from what he’s seen so far, the European continent: blue button-down shirt, charcoal-grey slacks, black wingtips.

On the table next to the laptop is a quarter-liter of Naturblond from Unser Bier (motto: Bier von hier). It’s drinkable, but its main attraction was the convenient placement of the taps: easy to point to.

Two days: Two days of nonstop talk, in between bouts of coughing. Diagramming the Day Job on whiteboards, juggling acronyms, trading product and process horror stories. Discourses in amateur cultural studies and amateur urbanology, the small talk of expatriates everywhere. (Very few of the people the protagonist has talked to are actually Swiss, and the Germans and the French and the English all have their own opinions.)

It’s all seemed to go well, but the protagonist is a little dazed. Two days of Thai red curry, coffee, Thai green curry, coffee, coffee, beer, beer, pineapple juice, fried chicken, fried plantains, yogurt, coffee, roast lamb, coffee, beer (von hier). Two nights of fitful sleep, an hour or two of wakefulness at three or four o’clock, then the sleep of the dead till the alarm goes off at seven like an air raid, followed by bells ringing up and down the Rhine. The protagonist’s metabolic clock is still somewhere over the Atlantic. The protagonist’s brain has been trying for two days to wrap itself around Hochdeutsch and Baseldütsch, two languages he doesn’t speak. Assurances that thirty percent of the people you meet in Basel are foreigners and everyone understands English meaning nothing to the monkey brain, which says Pass through the territory of the other tribe swiftly and without detection. The protagonist has played this game before, but not in a long while, perhaps too long, and he’s not entirely sure he remembers how. He tells himself that the first few days are always the hardest.

And also that this is only the practice round. If all goes well there will be another game, in six weeks, perhaps, or perhaps a month. He can look forward to living through these first days again; playing again, for real stakes.

The protagonist doesn’t know what he thinks. It’s all a little much for the monkey brain to deal with.

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December 7, 2005

For those of you keeping score at home, I’m still living in the apartment with the passive-aggressive hair-trigger manager lady, and doing my laundry down at the ’mat. I was going to move, but then I was maybe going to this another job, and then the job didn’t happen, and now . . . well, long story. But I’m so moving out in January, one way or another.

Garbage disposal. I busted it a couple of months ago by trying to dispose of a shot glass. (Unintentionally.) I’d have gotten it fixed, but that was about the same time as the laundry incident, and . . . So I haven’t used it, or that half of the sink, in weeks.

Some time in the last few days it just fell out of the sink.

Is that supposed to happen?

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November 28, 2005

• High-speed ferry rides, slept through: 1.
• Canadian border guards sure they’d seen me somewhere before, bags searched by: 1.
• Kung Pao chicken, dishes of, eaten: 0.
• Spicy chicken with bamboo shoots and a few peanuts, passed off as Kung Pao chicken, dishes of, eaten: 1.
• David Marusek novels, Counting Heads, recommended by Kelly Link, read: 1.
• David Marusek novels, endings to, understood: 0.
• David Marusek novels, enjoyed anyway: 1.
• Heart of Darkness-style alternate histories supposed to be finished this fall but derailed by weird resonance with Gulf hurricane events, finally finished: 0.
• Vaguely Borgesian short story, feedback-incorporating rewrites to, completed: 0.
• Twenty Epics, two remaining stories for, edits completed: 0.
• Twenty Epics, additional stories laid out in InDesign for: 2.
• Twenty Epics, stories remaining to be edited and/or laid out: 14.
• Novel, “Planet of the Amazon Women,” loose sequel to, actual words added: 360.
• Miscellaneous DOD and MOD documents relating to either naval Courts of Inquiry or procedures for notifying next of kin of the death of a loved one, said novel, research for, downloaded: 9.
• Novelette, months-old GvG rewrite requests for, finally completed and re-submitted: 1.
• Turkey dinners: 0.
• Haircuts: 1.

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November 24, 2005

Dear readers,

I’m writing this from an undisclosed location north of the 48th parallel, where I’m hiding out waiting for the holiday weekend to blow over. But I am thankful, and not just that I didn’t have to get on an airplane yesterday and don’t have to hit the malls tomorrow. I’m thankful that the luck of the draw, and some smart choices my parents made, and some lucky choices I made myself, have conspired to put me in a position to know all y’all and a few other people like you.

I’d be even more thankful if the Hunan Village over here on Fisgard Street made kung pao chicken the way Mom used to make it, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Enjoy your holiday, everybody. Don’t eat too much, unless it’s really good. (In which case, go crazy.)

Love,

David

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November 10, 2005

So the circus has left town. I’ve said all my goodbyes and I’m camping out in the abandoned shell of the Governor’s Club, wondering whether I should try to make it to 4:30 and the reopening of the bar, or head back to my room for a nap. Oh, the suspense! This is the excitement of which great postings are made. But before I resolve this cliffhanger, let’s pretend to do a con report.

The story about the rabbit is true. Also the story about the fairy porn in the pocket program. Also the story about the dragon porn — can you call it porn if it’s so bad you can’t tell if it was actually supposed to be erotic? — the dragon porn in the big New York publisher’s sample book. (Hey-o!) The story about the amazingly bad story written in haste by a posse of mostly-drunk authors outside the GC on Friday night, that one’s unfortunately true as well. (If I’ve left anyone off the copyright list, y’all don’t let them escape, y’hear? Let me know.)

More importantly, though, the TWENTY EPICS reading went off without a hitch. Unless you count my choice of author pictures for the poster.

Figure 1. The infamous promotional poster. We probably didn’t need a poster in the first place, but I couldn’t help it — I’m a desktop publishing junkie.

I suggested to Meghan that I could swap the pictures out before I put the poster up here, but she thought it would be better if I were to post it as-is, and then she and Alan and Dave could vilify me. Go nuts, kids!

We occupied a corner of the first floor overflow lounge, Sunday morning, and played to a packed house, if by “house” you mean “the circle in which people could sit comfortably around that corner and hear people read.” Dave and Meghan read the beginnings of their stories and Alan read a series of excerpts from his, and everybody seemed to have a good time, even those audience members who hadn’t realized they were going to be read at when they sat down.

The rest of the con wasn’t bad, either. If you weren’t there, we missed you; if you were there, I’m probably missing you already. ’nough said?

All right. The bar opens in ten minutes, and my battery’s running low. I’m sure the usual suspects (over on the left, there, if you’re reading this on my front page) will have more news.

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Update: Added link to JJA’s discussion of the dragon porn excerpt and corrected spelling of “Hey-o.”

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October 28, 2005

Seriously. I seem to have misplaced it somewhere. A couple of months ago I was blithely talking about how I was getting tired of Seattle and how for my next trick I’d probably be moving to “either Shanghai or Switzerland.” Then this week while I was home with a mild case of stomach flu, and poking around on Monster.com, I found myself thinking about looking for jobs in Portland. Portland.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Portland, as such. A smaller, less screwed-up version of Seattle, from what I can tell. The downtown’s nice. It’s got bookstores and stuff. But it’s nothing special, either. There’s no reason for me to move to Portland.

Moving to Portland would be a really safe choice.

Yeah.

I did look at jobs in Shanghai. (Didn’t find much.) I looked at jobs in Sydney. (Pay cut.) I looked at jobs in Switzerland. I even applied for one job in Surrey (UK, not BC), though I’m not really expecting to hear back. (Just because I found it in Monster’s “work abroad” section, doesn’t mean the company that posted it is actually interested in hiring expatriates.) And I thought a bit about Singapore, and Seoul, and even some places that didn’t start with S.

And I just couldn’t get excited about it.

After I graduated from high school I moved, like, five times in ten years. Now I’ve been in the same place for five and, God help me, it’s easier to just keep rolling along. When did this happen?

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October 11, 2005

Chiwetel Ejiofor is the man. Let’s get that out of the way up front. I’ve got nothing against Daniel Craig, but if Sony/MGM had any balls, Chewy would be the next James Bond.

As for the rest —

Things blur together. Clearly it is pure coincidence that the outfit Annabella Lwin was wearing, Saturday night at the Paramount, was no more than a strap and a shade of blue removed from the inexplicably tattered outfit Summer Glau was wearing all through Serenity. A strap, a shade of blue, and a pair of boots. Coincidence. Clearly it was only to be expected that Mark Mothersbaugh and the Casale brothers would embrace, extend, and accelerate any fragments of science-fictionality that might happen to be rattling around your subconscious. Clearly, going from the movie theatre, to Telegraph Avenue, to an Art Deco monument filled with exotic spuds of all ages, colors, shapes and sizes — following two hours of space cowboys and exploding spaceships with a comforting dip into familiar countercultural strangeness, that with the raucous but innocent carnality of Bow Wow Wow and that with the full-on, space-age, Technicolor, punk-rock superluminality of Devo — was asking to have my brain scrambled. And yet.

I don’t think at this point I can emotionally respond to Serenity in a way that doesn’t treat it as just one color of paint in the Pollock canvas that was this Saturday, especially since Sunday was red wine and California sunshine and mad conversation with Susan and Matt, and yesterday was hangover and not quite enough sleep and flying from summer into what on the California coast would easily pass for winter.

So what you get is the cold, clinical, intellectual reaction . . . which could best be described as a cartoon monkey in surgical scrubs with SCRIPT DOCTOR stenciled on his chest and the voice of Steve Buscemi, swinging from branch to branch through the tangled thickets of the plot, saying things like “Could we get a little romantic tension over here?” and “Listen, kid, make me care about the leads, then we’ll talk about this guy who’s only got six lines . . .”

What is Inner Script Monkey is trying to tell us? Well — Serenity was clearly a movie for the fans. It’s a high-mag zoom on overlapping segments of plot and character arc, high enough that some of the segments are optically flat, and all of them have their endpoints cropped out of the frame. It’s not that the plot wasn’t entirely comprehensible, but as a story, it was frustrating. It would have made a great season-ending two-part TV episode, but as a stand-alone film? Flat.

It’s easy to see what Inner Script Monkey would do, if there’d never been a TV show. Keep the prologue, cut the doctor and the crazy girl out of the opening sequences on the ship and the Wild West planet, make the fight scene in the bar the first time they meet the crew (making the captain’s choice to take them on contrast all the more sharply with his “I stick my neck out for no one” ethos). Show the crushes the doctor and the engineer have on one another instead of telling. Give some snappy Bogey-and-Bacall (or at least Ford-and-Fisher) scenes to the captain and the high-class tart. Give the village people more than one scene and the Oracle old black guy some more lines. Give us enough Union Alliance territory to make it clear why they’re worth fighting against, maybe a flashback or so to make it clear what the Confederates Independents went through. Give the crazy girl a costume change and a pair of shoes. You get the idea. There’s lots of ways to do it.

Script Monkey also would have had the schoolteacher in the dream sequence and the kids she was teaching, crazy girl included, sound like an actual schoolteacher and actual kids. He would have had the mad scientist sound like a sane scientist. And he would have either cut the folksy dialect or made the characters who spoke it speak it more consistently. But Script Monkey’s picky that way.

Seriously — I wanted to like it more than I did, which is a hundred and eighty from what I expected going in. I think most of the credit for that goes to the actors, not just Chewy Ejiofor, but the guy who played that one bad guy in Jade Empire, and the guy from A Mighty Wind and Best in Show, and the guy who had the cameo as the cult leader on Strangers with Candy, and the Baldwin brother who’s not actually a Baldwin brother, and the girl who’s done a bunch of TV that I haven’t seen, and the lady who probably deserves better than the work she’s got, and the girl who has really good hair, and the girl who could probably act well enough if she wasn’t being asked to play an anime character. They all tried like hell to sell it.

I don’t regret the cost of the ticket, by any means, but I do kind of regret not getting to see the movie it could have been.*

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* About that other movie, the one I didn’t actually get to see — just one question. If the Reavers are angry all the time, how do they keep their ships working? “Killing rage!! Arrrrgh! Must! Fix! Fusion! Reactor! Arrrrgh!”

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October 4, 2005

So, we’re down to 11½ hours of daylight and already I can feel the (undiagnosed, probably not clinical, but you never know) seasonal affective disorder setting in. It’s hard being a morning person when there’s barely an hour of morning before you need to be at the office, and even with daylight saving time to look forward to, it’s pretty much only going to get worse from now till January.

Anyway, I’m thinking of getting one of these. Amazon seems to sell a hell of a lot of them. Any of you ever use one? Or a conventional light box? Or maybe a dawn simulator? Consumer Reports has let me down on this one.

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Update: What the hell; I just sent away for a Pi-Square SunUp programmable lamp controller. (It can be found cheaper than at that link, but Indoor Sun is local and their web site isn’t as tacky-looking as the place I actually ordered it from.) The official phrase is, yes, “dawn simulator,” but that seems like an awfully fancy name for a rheostat connected to a timer. Still, it’s got some clinical trials backing it, and unlike the blue LED gizmo shouldn’t require me to actually pay attention to it once I’ve got it set up.

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October 2, 2005

Congratulations, Tim and Heather. Sorry I couldn’t be there.

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So, no eviction notice yet, though maybe it’s just that process servers don’t work Sundays. I looked at one apartment this weekend and wasn’t too impressed, and between heading down south to see Devo next weekend and World Fantasy at the end of the month — no, i still haven’t got tickets — I haven’t really got the time or the money to move in October. If no eviction notice turns up, it looks like I’ll be staying put at least through November.

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September 22, 2005

So, I know I’m lousy about removing my laundry from the communal laundry room in a timely fashion. But is stealing my clothes really the most appropriate way to communicate to me that my laundry habits have become a problem for you?

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Update: And, yes, it was the apartment manager.

At least she didn’t try to give me a lecture along with my laundry. I’d probably be posting this from jail.

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Update (9/22): And today I came home to a note threatening me with eviction on grounds of violating my lease agreement by harassing my fellow residents — to wit, my “threatening” note. The text of said note, for reference:

To the person or persons unknown who made off with my laundry: I appreciate your strength of feeling, and I apologize, sincerely, for any inconvenience my cavalier laundry habits may have caused you.

That said — and particularly given that you made no other attempt to communicate your displeasure to me — I consider the theft of my clothes to be a thoroughly disproportionate and highly inappropriate response. A simple note in the laundry basket would have been sufficient.

Please return my clothes to the laundry room and spare us both any further unpleasantness.

I’ll be evicted if I don’t comply within ten days. Comply with what, I’m not exactly sure.

I was going to move anyway.

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September 15, 2005

It’s going to take me more than a quick blog post from work to explicate my sudden yet deep-rooted resentment of Ivan Tribble. In the mean time, though, the Tensor’s “The Paradox of Japan” is a must-read. And absolutely accurate. (Barzak, you back me up.)

As the nation emerged from occupation in the 1950’s with its new and unique constitution, in which it forsook the practice of war for all time, it seemed poised to chart a course different from that of any other nation. Just how different was more surprising than anyone expected.

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September 14, 2005

Don’t make me go get a Ph. D., you condescending little fearmonger.

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September 2, 2005

I read y’all’s blogs and I can’t decide whether I should feel lucky for not having cable, or irresponsible for not exposing myself to the full force of the coverage.

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August 31, 2005

From ArtsJournal’s ongoing hurricane coverage: A children’s hospital is reportedly under siege by looters. Not supposed to happen. Where’s the solidarity? Where’s the community spirit? Would this happen in New York?

(N.B.: I’ll cease to be freaked out by this if I find out there are not in fact any patients in the children’s hospital at this time. I’d be tempted to loot a hospital under the circumstances myself, I expect. I’d be one of the folks looting the Wal-Mart for sure, and what I’d be doing is trying to organize a community bucket brigade to loot all the bottled water, canned food, and first aid supplies. In the immortal words of Sigourney Weaver: They can bill me.)

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Update: The Times-Picayune blog has the less Mad Max “Also, looters tried to break into Children’s Hospital, the governor’s office said”

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Update: I take that back.

Late Tuesday, Gov. Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher described a disturbing scene unfolding in uptown New Orleans, where looters were trying to break into Children's Hospital.

Bottcher said the director of the hospital fears for the safety of the staff and the 100 kids inside the hospital. The director said the hospital is locked, but that the looters were trying to break in and had gathered outside the facility.

The director has sought help from the police, but, due to rising flood waters, police have not been able to respond.

Bottcher said Blanco has been told of the situation and has informed the National Guard. However, Bottcher said, the National Guard has also been unable to respond.

Though it’s still not the Assault on Precinct 13 scenario I was hearing in the word siege.

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Update: It’s all a big lie, apparently:

Doug Mittelstaedt, vice-president of Human Resources for Children’s Hospital in New Orleans, said one of the biggest issues at the hospital on Wednesday was debunking the prevalent rumor that looters had stormed the hospital.

Mittelstaedt said things actually were operating smoothly at the hospital — the generator was running efficiently and efforts to relocate patients were going well — but fighting the rumor was a major issue.

Officials had to lock the doors of the hospital because people had arrived, apparently thinking there was a mob scene and they could get in on looting.

Nice. (Thanks for the link, Rob.)

(By the way, some of the permalinks on NOLA.com are broken, because the name attributes of the <a> tags have #s in them; you may need to double the # in the link if you want to post it somewhere.)

Comments (11)

August 26, 2005

Fig. 1. Best metaphor for the Internet ever, courtesy of Cat and Girl.

Comments (6)

August 11, 2005

Things I learned on the way to Scotland:

• JFK is the worst airport.
• Changing clothes in an airplane toilet takes longer than you think. But it sure beats the alternative.
• St. Pancras Station is always under construction.
• Shane Warne is one hell of a bowler. (His new hair plugs look pretty good, too.)
• On the train, when you close your eyes for a short nap, and wake up in love with the girl pushing the coffee trolley, it’s ’cause you’re jet-lagged.

Things I learned in Scotland:

• It’s not just London that at 5:30 in the morning looks like the set of 28 Days Later. (I blame the tower blocks.)
• Best UK con custom e-var: Free drinks for every panelist in the Green Room before each panel. We need to import this one, guys.
• Irn-Bru tastes better than you’d think.
• Scotch doesn’t kill germs. Tequila kills germs. (Thanks, Gwenda!)
• You can get away with bringing overheads to a panel, if they’re good overheads.
• It’s still possible to have a good panel about slipstream, even if infernokrusher only comes up once or twice. (Thanks, Hal!)
• I should have listened to everybody who told me to read Paul Park’s A Princess of Roumania.
• Ben and I, in combination, are too loud. (Yeah, I know I should have known this one already.)
• Christopher Rowe really is a genius.

Things I learned on the way back from Scotland:

• JFK is the worst airport.
• However, it has the nicest immigration officers.
• And the beer’s not bad, either.

But:

• WisCon is still the Best Con.

Comments (14)

August 8, 2005

Really. To all of you.

And so do I. Thanks for the condolences, everybody. It’s cool, really. And well done, Bear. (I knew I was doomed as soon as I saw Hammered in an airport bookstore. :)) I couldn’t ask better than to lose to such an honorable opponent.

Best part of the Campbell part of the ceremony: So Stan Schmidt’s talking about the award, and reading the list of nominees, right? And on the stage about twenty feet behind him is a guy holding the actual plaque. And as Stan’s talking, the camera zooms in on it. And there’s ELIZABETH BEAR up there on the video screens over his head in letters two feet high. (Camera zooms out quickly, but — too late!)

It was such a relief, really.

(And we got a good laugh out of watching Stan — who I’m pretty sure had no idea about any of these video hijinks — digressing and fiddling with the envelope and trying to draw out the tension. Brilliant.)

Anyway: My airport hotel here in Heathrow, unlike the Glasgow Hilton, does have free wi-fi (insert joke about civilized England and barbarian Scotland here, only don’t ’cause you’ll probably get your teeth kicked in) but it only seems to work reliably when the computer is turned on its side. Which, even with me turned on my side, is not what you call an ergonomic typing position. Or maybe that’s not what’s going on and maybe it would work fine if I took it over to the desk again, but electromagnetic fields are the point where I stopped paying attention in high school physics (partly ’cause I didn’t believe in “field lines” but mostly ’cause I was too lazy to learn any equations I couldn’t derive from F=ma or PV=nRT) and it’s all a big mystery to me and I’m not going to risk it.

(But any net access at all feels like land after a shipwreck, God help me. It’s a very SFnal feeling. Like Case on the temperfoam in Cheap Hotel after the surgery. I miss everybody — even you folks I saw less than 24 hours ago, though not quite so much as the ones who couldn’t make it.)

So, more later. Maybe from JFK tomorrow evening, if my layover’s as long as it looks.

Comments (2)

July 31, 2005

Okay, so from here it’s the eastern ocean, but traditionally the Western Ocean is what it’s been called and — look, just call me ‘Wrong Way’ Moles if it makes you happy.

Fig. 1. Handy PDF version, complete with special-edition typos and colored boxes that don’t quite line up

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Update: Added location of SFWA suite. ’Cause if I just write it down somewhere, I’ll lose it, but I can always rely on þe olde weblogge.

Comments (16)

July 20, 2005

So who’s going where?

• Worldcon, I think I pretty much know who is and isn’t going . . . anyway at the moment I’m in full travel-dread mode and kind of expecting the whole thing to go by in a jet-lagged blur. (I used to love traveling. Now I just like being places. What happened? I must be getting old.)
• CascadiaCon/NASFiC, anybody? (Please?) I know if nobody shows up it’ll be my fault for running it down (¿¡Airport hotel!? ¿What’s wrong with you people? ¡Aaargh!), but still, come on, we’ll find a way to make it fun. And you may get to see the Twenty Epics cover in the art show. Or just come up to Seattle and skip the con.
• World Fantasy: I wasn’t planning on it ’cause after Glasgow I’ll be down to, like, two vacation days, but people keep saying “I do believe in Madison! Clap your hands!” So who’s going? Maybe I could skip Christmas this year.

Comments (25)

July 8, 2005

Hang in there.

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Update: Ken Livingstone is the man.

Comments (1)

July 5, 2005

On my way to a week in the northeast corner of Florida tonight, land of sailboats, daiquiris, grilled prawns, and mosquitoes. Taking a big old stack of books with titles like Documents on the French Revolution of 1848 and Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in 20th-Century America and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. They’ve been piling up for four or five years, research for the Planetary Romance, and I figure if I buckle down and treat this like an academic project I can (1) get rid of the books and (2) eliminate my last actual excuse not to write it.

Then I can go ahead and not write it, but with a clear conscience.

I’m going to try to stay off the interweb as much as possible while I’m there, but those of you who know me know I’ve never been Mr. Self Control, so I’m sure I’ll line on and update my web-station here at some point.

I had a big rant planned about why I think conteporary short SF sucks and why listening to me would be a dumb thing for magazine editors and publishers to do, but, y’know, screw it, I’m lazy. I’m just going to kick back and wait for Eggers and Chabon to save the genre in their spare time.

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Update (5 July): Apparently shrimp are deep-fried here, not grilled. I stand corrected.

Also, note to self: Insisting on starting your piña colada with an actual coconut and an actual pineapple is pretentious and will just lead to trouble.

Comments (2)

June 22, 2005

The straight dope:

Thursday 9:20am: Arrive Heathrow airport

• Me
• Lots of other people

Thursday 12:55pm: Depart Kings Cross railway station

• Me
• Lots of other people

Thursday 6:42pm: Arrive Glasgow Central railway station

• Me
• Lots of other people

So, I know the con recommends taking a coach from Heathrow to Watford Junction and taking the train from there. I’m sure it’s faster, less of a pain in the ass, etc. But I couldn’t find a site that would actually book and sell me the ticket — Virgin Rail would book me direct from Terminal 3 to Anderston, but wouldn’t actually mail it to the States, while National Rail (the all-companies booking service) would intermittently refuse to even admit there was such a timetable. Whereas Rail Europe (which I ended up using) would admit to the existence of London and Glasgow, but not to anything more local.

So: Heathrow to Paddington to Kings Cross to Edinburgh to Glasgow, at a cost of 90 minutes to my arrival time, and a certain amount of aggravation on both ends, but with service that actually works, and at a savings of $140 (on a first-class ticket) over Virgin and National Rail. Which ought to cover the Heathrow Express and a Zone 1 tube fare, at least.

Friday 2:00pm: Kaffeeklatsch (1.5 hrs)

• Me
• Stanley Schmidt
• Lars-Olov Strandberg
• Robert Vogel

I’m guessing most of the folks who show up will be there to try to figure out what they need to do to sell something to Stan Schmidt. (Hey, maybe I should try to find that out, too. I haven’t even submitted anything to Analog in at least two or three years.)

Saturday 12:00 noon: New Writers & the Campbell

• Jay Lake
• Me
• Chris Roberson
• Stanley Schmidt (M)
• Steph Swainston

What is the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award and what has it meant to these finalists and winners? Learn where these writers started and where they've gone since.

Jay, I love you, man, but if this turns into “How the Hugo Awards Ruined My Life” I’m gonna have to kick your ass. I’m just sayin’.

Also Saturday 12:00 noon: Dealers’ room

• Me
• Lots of actual dealers

I’m supposed to man a table in the dealers’ room for the Science Fiction Foundation, who have kindly agreed to let me pimp my books. Only at the moment I’m cross-scheduled against the Campbell panel. I’ll definitely be manning the table at some point, I’m just not sure when.

Sunday 12:00 noon (tentatively): Hugo rehearsals

• Me
• Lots of people who are not me, many of whom are nominated for actual Hugos rather than pseudo- or quasi-Hugos

Presumably this is my chance to stand in front of a mirror practicing how to say “Fuck — I got a Hugo not-a-Hugo.”

Sunday 6ish: Pre-Hugo reception

• Me
• Lots of people who are not me, many of whom are nominated for actual Hugos rather than pseudo- or quasi-Hugos

And this is my chance to try to make an impression on my fellow nominees as a nervous wreck, rather than as a drunk (see below).

Sunday 8:00pm: Hugo ceremony

• Me
• Lots of people who are not me, many of whom are nominated for actual Hugos rather than pseudo- or quasi-Hugos

Nap time for the rest of you.

Monday 12:00pm (?): Hugo losers’ party

• Me
• Lots of people who are not me, many of whom have just won or lost actual Hugos rather than pseudo- or quasi-Hugos

Hangover city.

Monday 12:00pm: Depart Glasgow Central railway station

• Me
• Lots of other people

Monday 5:42pm: Arrive London Kings Cross railway station

• Me
• Lots of other people

Monday 6:00pm: Drop bags off at Paddington station

• Me
• Lots of other people

Or maybe head straight out to Heathrow and my hotel, depending on whether anyone’s around in London for dinner.

Monday 9:00pm: Check into Radisson Edwardian Heathrow

• Me
• Lots of other people

Last chance to enjoy jet lag.

Tuesday 11:55am: Depart Heathrow airport

• Me
• Lots of other people

Comments (6)

Or until they start arguing about the rules.

Comments (6)

June 21, 2005

John Scalzi has a hilarious post calling the NYT to task for its, as he puts it, “mild heterosexual panic.”

It doesn’t seem likely people would confuse me for being gay anymore, what with the wife and child and rural red-state lifestyle and the Wal-Mart clothes, but if they did, you know what I would think? Good. Here in the US, gay is the new British, which is to say that if people think you're gay, they also think you are smarter, wittier, and more fun to be around than the average guy. Sure, you sodomize other men on occasion, but that’s your business, and we Americans always suspected British men had sodomy as a required subject at Eton. So it’s all the same, really. And in the meantime you always say the perfect thing at the perfect moment. You’re more entertaining than cable! And what could possibly be wrong with that? If people know you're a straight guy, on the other hand, they automatically think you’re a beef-witted social dullard in a Linux shirt hoping to delude some poor woman into accepting a sperm packet or two. In a word: Eeeeeeew.

I actually thought the gaydar article — yes, the filename actually is 19GAYDAR.html, and how much more fabulous than that can you get, really? — was amusing and, generally, positive. But John’s still right. Confuse away.

(The “man date” article, on the other hand, was from another planet. Possibly the same planet — hi, Marie! — where a woman eating alone in a restaurant has to worry she’ll be mistaken for a prostitute.)

Comments (1)

June 15, 2005

. . . is what I would think we should call ourselves if we were a performance troupe and not just some folks who like to dress up and hit things.

But, anyway, as long as we’re just some folks, ever since Lisa showed me a few tricks at last year’s WFC, I’ve been feeling envious of these friends of mine who are learning how to kill people with their bare hands and not just with a thirty-inch razor blade. And ever since Wiscon I’ve been feeling unusually motivated about all sorts of stuff (though not the damn planetary romance, which is why I was whining about time travel yesterday afternoon — I was working on the gonzo space opera when I shouldn’t have been). So yesterday I finally got around to checking out Shorinji Kempo Seattle, and next week I’ll be starting lessons. Further bulletins as events warrant.

But in the mean time, thanks to Greg and Jenn for agreeing to kick my ass if I didn’t do this.

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Update (15 June ’05): So, I went last night and it was a blast. The people were friendly and patient. The warm-up exercises were challenging without being brutal. The footwork and the actual punching and kicking and stuff were confusing at first, but by the end of practice I think I was starting to get the hang of it. (And an eleven-year-old girl told me I was doing pretty well for a beginner, so it must be true.) I could easily have gone on for another hour.

The hardest thing for me, personally, is probably going to be learning to sit crosslegged without falling over.

Comments (8)

June 10, 2005

Jamie Zawinski, old-school hacker, nightclub owner, author or co-author of XEmacs and xscreensaver and various versions of Netscape, has finally punted on Linux in favor of MacOS:

Remember last week, when I tried to buy exactly the same audio card that 99.99% of the world owns and convince Linux to be able to play two sounds at once? Yeah, turns out, that was the last straw. I bought an iMac, and now I play my music with iTunes.

This took . . . let me see . . . just about zero effort. Well, I still have to go buy some longer audio cables, but that's it.

I plugged a mouse with three buttons and a wheel into the Mac, and it just worked without me having to read the man page on xorg.conf or anything. Oh frabjous day.

Go ahead and say “I told you so” if it makes you feel better. . . .

Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.

Comments (3)

June 6, 2005

I was hoping these would be ready in time for WisCon so everyone could meet the new, measurably less unhip Me, but no such luck.

Figure 1. The author, hoping he doesn’t have to start reading R. Crumb now

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Update: It’s kind of amusing what the glasses are doing to my self-image — I guess this must be how women feel when they get new haircuts. At the moment I’m sitting in the King County Regional Justice Center (they have wi-fi — whee!) waiting to get called up for jury duty, wearing my new specs and my Black Spot sneakers and my Cold War Supervillain shirt and my blue blazer, in persona as an up-and-coming science fiction writer. (I feel like some sort of intermediate stage between my ordinary self and that woman who showed up for Whitewater jury duty in a Starfleet uniform.) (Google, google . . . aha. “Barbara Adams.”)

Comments (13)

June 3, 2005

Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.

Comments (2)

May 13, 2005

Update: Some additional suggestions:

• Kenneth Kushner, One Arrow One Life: Zen Archery and Enlightenment
• Fumio Demura, Sai, Karate Weapon of Self-Defense, Tonfa, Karate Weapon of Self-Defense, etc.
• Takayuki Kubota, Kubotan Keychain — Instrument of Attitude Adjustment

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I’m going to use this as a scratchpad, and put together a reading (and maybe film) list to hand out at the weapons panel. Thoughts so far:

• Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe
• John Keegan, The Face of Battle
• Hans Talhoffer / Marc Rector, Medieval Combat
• Donn Draeger, Japanese Swordsmanship

Um . . . you’d think I’d be able to come up with more Japanese stuff, wouldn’t you? (I guess I’m too lazy to try to learn it any other way than with a sword in my hand.)

As I think of more stuff, I’ll try to post it in comments. Additions welcome.

Comments (5)

May 6, 2005

So, my Wiscon schedule includes the following item:

Meet the Weapons Demo (Writing SF&F: The Craft)
Sunday, 1:00-2:15 p.m. in 629

A follow-up to a combat panel that discussed various weapons that show up primarily in fantasy, but also SF (short on actual data about the effects of phasers and the like, unfortunately), this panel, ideally, assists audience members to write more accurate/realistic fight scenes without having to train with a weapons master. Brief demos on a number of weapons that show up in SF&F are provided (to see how they work, what they are designed to do, and what they aren’t). A chance follows for the audience to, again, see the weapons up close and personal.

There’s only two of us on it, me and S.N. Arly, who I haven’t met. Ms. Arly seems to be coming from Minnesota and hopefully will have a trunkload of stuff, but all I’ve got is my iaito. Anyone have any dangerous items they can bring? Or want to join the panel?

Then there’s my other program item, immediately following a tough act.

A Reading at Midnight (Readings)
Sunday, 11:30pm -12:45 a.m in Conference Room 2

James P. Roberts, David Robert Moles, Sharman Horwood, James Frenkel

I thought I had a pattern figured out, but since it involves Jameses and Robertses it doesn’t explain Ms. Horwood. Anyway, I was kind of planning on a pirate story for Ben’s proposed pirate reading, but it’s a long way from done and without the looming pirate deadline I’d be surprised if I finish it. Might just read from “Planet of the Amazon Women”, since it’ll have just gone up on Strange Horizons, and since it’s WisCon. Any other suggestions? I have to admit, whatever happens I doubt I’ll be able to match the Pretty Butlers of Roanoke.

Comments (0)

May 4, 2005

After some dithering I finally decided ¡al diablo, el sentido común!* and booked myself an extra couple of days in Glasgow. I should be arriving Thursday night and leaving Monday morning, via London, probably by train.

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* That should probably be in Gaelic, but I don’t speak Gaelic. And I just like saying sentido común.

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April 30, 2005

• Portland was wet.
• Chicago is smaller in real life. Or seems that way. Maybe because it’s so flat.
• Christopher Rowe’s mime version of this and this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all year.
• I thought I hated the 70s mainly for aesthetic but basically progressive reasons. Apparently I was wrong: hating the 70s is code for hating feminism. (Okay, I’m exaggerating. But.)
• Belated capsule review of Steamboy: Otomo may be twice the animator that Miyazaki is, but he’s quite a bit less than half the storyteller. (Still better than Oshii, though.)

Oh, and:

• Twenty Epics is going to be a good book.

Comments (22)

April 20, 2005

Talking about economics, Brad deLong hits on exactly the problem that’s been bothering me for the last several months about not just everyone from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand, but Proust, Derrida, Dave Sim and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too.

Just what a "Galbraithian" economist would do, however, is not clear. For Galbraith, there is no single market failure, no single serpent in the Eden of perfect competition. He starts from the ground and works up: What are the major forces and institutions in a given economy, and how do they interact? A graduate student cannot be taught to follow in Galbraith's footsteps. The only advice: Be supremely witty. Write very well. Read very widely. And master a terrifying amount of institutional detail.

Harry Johnson, in his superb but not entirely fair critique of Milton Friedman's Monetarists, said that in order to carry out an intellectual revolution in economics, one must propound a doctrine that has three qualities: it can be summarized in a single sentence, it provides the young with an excuse for ignoring the work of their elders, and it tells the young what they can do to further the revolution. John Maynard Keynes and Friedman both offered such doctrines. They said, respectively, that "aggregate demand determines supply" and that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"; they dismissed their predecessors as obsolete; and they set hundreds of young to the task of estimating consumption, investment, and money-demand functions.

Galbraith propounded no such easily summarized doctrine. The closest we can get is: "the world is complicated, and both right-wing ideology and the conventional wisdom that is this age's self-image are terribly wrong." He offered critiques that required you to read and understand old theories, not new theories that allowed you to dismiss everything prior as irrelevant.

The result? Nearly all economists today are Paul Samuelson's children. Many are Keynes' children. Friedman, Robert Lucas, Robert Solow, and James Tobin all have plenty of descendants. But there are few Galbraithians on the ground. Would economics as a discipline be stronger if the 50-year-old and 30-year-old economists had a better appreciation of Galbraith? Almost surely. Will the winds of economic fashion shift and cause economists to appreciate Galbraith once again? For that to happen, an astute young economist would have to devote himself to "mathing up" chapters of The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State and publishing them in journals-not a likely prospect in today's risk-adverse academic environment.

Brad deLong, reviewing Richard Parker’s John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics.

Here’s my position: “the young” are not wrong in failing to be moved by thinkers whose doctrines cannot be easily summarized.

Life is too short to read The Complete Works of Everybody.

Comments (8)

April 18, 2005

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

20% Yankee

10% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

Comments (16)

February 23, 2005

Aside from one C on an unsuccessful experiment with an alternative essay structure, I mostly wrote A-quality papers for my high school English classes. The actual grades,, though, were often Ds, since I usually couldn’t be bothered to turn the papers in till two or three weeks after the due date. All of which is to say that I’ve already anticipated all of your calumnies, and I am unmoved.

Still, I do need to get back to doing my job. So tomorrow look for The First Year of the Reign of Ur-Nungal (2574 BC).

(In the mean time, go interrogate some boundaries or something.)

And speaking of high school, my alma mater seems to have decided that my literary accomplishments are worth a write-up in the quarterly alumni magazine, with accompanying photograph. Not having an accompanying photograph, I talked Lara into coming out this weekend and taking a few Snicketesque snapshots. So if any of you didn’t already know what I look like, now you do. (You can even pretend I dress that way all the time, if you like.)

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January 28, 2005

After two days out I’m now back at work, with six new stitches right down the center of my chest (we’re going to pretend it’s a duelling scar, okay?) and a full bottle of generic Keflex, but without a chunk of flesh about the size of a 20¢ gumball. (I know there’s no such thing as a 20¢ gumball, but it was bigger than a 10¢ gumball and smaller than a 25¢ gumball.)

You know what I’m going to be thinking about while I’m watching the new “Merchant of Venice.”

For those of you following along at home, apparently what I’ve got isn’t staph but some sort of diphtheroid. Which summons up images of impoverished ex-Soviet republics or WWII Army hospitals (like my friend Andy said: Sulfa drugs? Diptheria? What did you do, spend Christmas on the Western Front?); but it turns out to be a pretty large family that includes a lot of common “skin flora,” down to and including the ones that cause acne. So whatever it is, it’s probably been there for twenty years, and just finally decided it needed more Lebensraum. Here’s hoping its national aspirations have finally been quashed with sufficient force.

Comments (8)

January 24, 2005

Friday I stayed up till nearly midnight hanging out with Jed and Ted and Mike and Johnzo and Victoria. (We think there should be a cable channel called the Fire Channel. And we fear that someone will start turning out Philip K. Dick sequels: We Can Build You Again, Our Friends From Frolix Nine, We Can Remember It For You Retail.) Saturday I stayed up till nearly one over at Dave and Marcy’s, watching all three LOTR movies back-to-back, in the extended cut. (Frodo got a raw deal.) Yesterday I worked on “Planet of the Amazon Women” a bit (though not enough), and watched “When We Were Kings” (which gave me a renewed appreciation for Will Smith’s “Ali”) and “Atomic Café” (which gave me a renewed appreciation for Fallout), and went to bed early. Today I still couldn’t get up till ten to seven — less than an hour before sunrise.

Some day this winter’s gonna end.

Comments (3)

January 18, 2005

The third installment in the Irrational Histories series is up — should’ve been up yesterday, but I spaced on it. Somehow I went from being full of Big Plans the first couple of days of the year to being completely unable to get my act together, in just a couple of weeks. Hopefully it’s the drugs.

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January 3, 2005

Looking backward:

• ASZAS. Props to Jay, Deb, Lara, Greg, and all our authors. This one’s for you.
• Also: “The Ideas”, Flytrap #2; “Five Irrational Histories”, Rabid Transit #3; “The Third Party”, Asimov’s #whatever (September). All the stories I wrote in 2003, I sold, so I can’t complain.
• Wrote four more stories. Two, “Finisterra” and “Planet of the Amazon Women” I put serious work into. (The first is looking for a home and the second is in queue for a rewrite request.) The others, “Non Servimus” and “Marlow Ashore”, being written more haphazardly, under duress. Undoubtedly something will be done about them sooner or later.
• After 3100 miles of road trip, I really have to hand it to the designers and builders of the interstate highway system. Also to the fine engineers at Toyota, and at Sumitomo Rubber Industries. The guys who made my tire chains, though, not so much.
• Namecheck: Steven Clark. Orgcheck: The Wig Lodge of the Immersion Composition Society. How does this make me feel? Note the words in high volume. It makes me feel like a decadent dilettante.
• Forty-four hours is far too short a time to spend among such excellent and admirable . . . you get the idea. I’m glad I saw those of you I saw and sorry I missed those I missed.
• I don’t think I have anything new to say about the Boxing Day tsunami, but you could do worse than start with Ben Rosenbaum’s collection of charity data.

Looking forward:

• The day job’s better than it’s ever been. Now all I need is a waterfront office, a personal assistant, a pony and some ice cream, and my day-job life would be complete.
• Twenty Epics. I can feel it in my bones: this is going to be fun. But only y’all can make it as good as it deserves to be, so get scribblin’. (Or composin’. Or storyboardin’. Or whatever.)
• Irrational Histories. Through a chain of events too dull to relate, I’ve ended up with a Blogspot Blog. Not wishing to detract from the glory of the august publication you have on your screen before you, I have no intention of actually blogging on it. Instead, I’ll be publishing weekly abstracts of things that couldn’t possibly have happened, starting with the five from Rabid Transit. Who knows, maybe after I’ve accumulated a couple of hundred of the things someone will offer me a book contract and I’ll become the Alan Lightman of the humanities set. Comments welcome.
• This is not to say I’m not going to be working on Intervention, the novel that follows on from and perhaps incorporates “The Third Party”.
• Though it may be some effort not to work on the other novel, set in the rather stranger universe of “Finisterra” and “Planet of the Amazon Women”. No title yet, but a first line: In Utopia the finest views are reserved for the dead. (Has someone used that already? Let me know.)

Excelsior!

Comments (4)

November 29, 2004

Spent the weekend in New York City, visiting my dad there for probably the last time, since he’s lost the job that brought him there and will be moving out in a couple of weeks. Spent time with Dad and watched my sister shop and hung out a little with Deb Green over in Queens. Not a bad way to spend a weekend, but I definitely need better shoes next time.

And it’s gonna suck not having a base of operations on the Upper West Side.

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Update: Oh, yeah, and I saw “I, Robot” — the film most cited this year by a certain sort of SF fan as A Sign Of The End Of Civilization As We Know It — on the plane. It didn’t suck; or, at least, it didn’t suck more than most of Hollywood’s attempts in its subgenre. Which is to say: It was more entertaining than “A.I.” and less stupid than “Total Recall”.

And, guess what? It’s true to Asimov’s stories after all. Not in the details, naturally — let’s face it: those short stories would mostly be unfilmable, or if faithfully filmed, unwatchable — but the themes aren’t that different, and the film ends up going exactly where Asimov eventually went.

Apart from one minor detail, that is. In Asimov’s universe, the film’s bad guys win.

Comments (1)

November 17, 2004

The portable library:

1. “Big Tears”, Elvis Costello
2. “The Passion”, Billy Bragg
3. “Birthday”, The SugarCubes
4. “Who’s Afraid (of the Art of Noise)”, The Art of Noise
5. “The Ways of Men”, The Waterboys
6. “Some Day Soon”, Ian & Sylvia
7. “Alkusanat”, Hedningarna
8. “Believe”, R.E.M.
9. “When Love Comes to Town”, U2
10. “AKA Driver”, They Might Be Giants

The luggable library:

1. “Spy”, They Might Be Giants
2. “It Could Be Sweet”, Portishead
3. “Just Like Betty Page”, The Jazz Butcher
4. “Wild Bill Jones”, Alison Krauss
5. “Heartattack & Vine”, Tom Waits
6. “Peek-A-Boo”, Devo
7. “Love or Confusion”, Jimi Hendrix
8. “Nothing Without You”, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
9. “Hidden Combat”, Alison Statton
10. “Crucify (EP mix)”, Tori Amos

Yes, unlike some folks’, my music taste apparently stopped moving forward in 1994. It’s that late-90s retro thing — Oasis ripping off the Beatles, Lenny Kravitz ripping off Jimi Hendrix, Green Day and the Offspring ripping off the Clash and the Ramones, the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies ripping off Bix Beiderbecke and Lew Stone. Unreconstructed historical phenomenalist that I am, I figured I’d skip the middleman.

---

Update: Oh, yeah, and two incredibly disappointing albums: Monster and Dulcinea. (Not to mention Boys for Pele, which wasn’t actually unforgivable but was still, kind of, you know, pointless.)

Comments (7)

November 1, 2004

Anyway, they are an order of conventionals, as no doubt you’ve already discerned. The red is for the descending light of the New Sun, and they descend on landowners, traveling around the country with their cathedral and seizing enough to set it up.

—Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

And we descended on the landowners of Tempe, Arizona, this past weekend, and seized the Mission Palms Hotel in which to set up our cathedral.

The Zeppelin launch party was a smashing success (er — sorry about the closet floor, guys), even though the books themselves were locked in the dealers’ room and we didn’t have enough Scotch tape or tonic water or quite enough beer. Someone, somewhere, has got pix of Deb and Jay and I in our spiffy Zeppelin crew outfits (courtesy of Deb — go Deb!) and once I get some I’ll post ’em. At least eighty percent of everybody who was anybody was there, and several of ’em bought books later, so well done, us. Props to Greg and Dr. Lisa for helping us shop and set up. Four of our authors were there, and I got to meet the two I hadn’t, Carrie “This is the Highest Step in the World” Vaughn and Jim “Where and When” Van Pelt, whose work I had theretofore admired from a distance. Plus David “Love in the Balance” Levine and Jed “Last of the Zeppelins” Hartman.

After that the weekend’s a bit of a blur. Saturday I remember crepes, followed by some martial arts tomfoolery (pix, Jon?) on the banks — all right, near the banks — of the Salt River, and lunch at name redacted, and reading an excerpt from “Planet of the Amazon Women” (currently under examination by Strange Horizons — Jed was kind enough to fish it off his laptop for me) at the SH tea party, getting Tempest to read an excerpt from the unsuspecting Jed’s “Last of the Zeppelins” at the same tea party, and too much of some pretty decent Chinese food later in the evening, with a large crowd that included Vera Nazarian (but not, despite the evidence of the official photos — pix, Vera? — Samantha Ling). (Thanks for the appetizers, Mary Anne! And for lots of other stuff.) I went to bed early and so missed the hijinks at the Tor Party. (I don’t regret missing the party, but I do regret missing the Tor folk. Toroids? I know Toroidal is the adjective . . .)

Sunday . . . caught up on my sleep, at least arithmetically, but still felt hung over till I’d had a couple of espressos and a couple of cups of coffee and lots of orange juice. But it was sunny and we ate outdoors — try doing that in Seattle right now — and there were eggs over easy with chile-rubbed slow-roasted pork, and there was plenty of good conversation. Greg stopped his con report on account of not wanting to drop names, but I haven’t got anything better to do, so, clockwise from my left: Greg, Dr. Lisa, Ted Chiang, Jon Hansen, Samantha Ling (for real this time), Lisa Moore, Jenn Reese. They’re all sweethearts, and smart and funny too. Then I packed up my stuff (except for the laundry I knew was going to forget to clean out of the dresser drawer) and chatted with folks in the dealers’ room and the lobby for a while, and headed back to the Great Green North.

Oh, and we almost didn’t talk politics the whole time. Score!

Comments (3)

October 22, 2004

I came to realize that such conversations were appropriate only within the context of relationship. Outside of that context, there’s little possibility for give and take, for listening as well as talking, and what happens isn’t really a conversation at all, but a well-intentioned form of verbal assault.

— Fred “slacktivist” Clark

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October 5, 2004

In less mean-spirited news: It’s my birthday. Y’all feel free to take the rest of the day off.

Comments (12)

September 15, 2004

I should have posted ten days ago about my week in NoCal, but I didn’t, and now it’s all a big blur. But let’s try:

• Shout-out to all my homies at the Locus party.
• Don’t see King Arthur unless you’re, like, a serious Clive Owen fan. (And even then, don’t pay full price.) Also: that guy from Horatio Hornblower should actually play Lancelot some time, instead of just some guy named Lancelot. He’d be good.
• Hero proves
  1. that Jet Li is The Man
  2. that Maggie Chung is a serious contender for The Woman, and
  3. that I’m bored with wire-fighting now.
• San Jose’s ethnic and economic diversity make Seattle look like Omaha. —No, like a middle-class white suburb of Omaha.
• I may have to get a new freezer, so I can justify ordering It’s Its by the case. Unless somebody can tell me where to get them up here.

Now, what happened after that?

Finished revising “Finisterra” and sent it off to Ms. Datlow. (I think I’ve reached some new Zen state in my writing career, because the fact that “Finisterra” is the first thing I’ve submitted since “Five Irrational Histories” last November — and that was invitational — doesn’t embarrass me in the slightest.)

Finished a first draft of “Planet of the Amazon Women” in time to have the Fairwood Writers’ Group look at it for tomorrow evening. That one I expect to be in the ether to Strange Horizons by the end of the month.

Finished proofreading the anthology. So did Jay. So did Kathy Oltion. Hooray for blue pencils and folded-down corners. Guess what I’ll be spending this weekend doing.

Got an initial version of the new Cascade Kendo Kai web site up and runnng, including registering a domain, setting up a hosting provider, the whole twenty-seven shaku.

Helped put on a kendo demo at the Eastside Nihon Matsuri. Got to see the Relnick-senseis’ Katori Shinto Ryu kenjutsu, always a treat. (Also got to see Shorinji Kempo in action and confirmed to myself that if I ever have time, while I’m still in Seattle, to squeeze in another martial art in addition to kendo, short-story-do, novel-do and anthology-do, these guys are it.)

Spent too much time surfing the web while waiting for stuff to compile and deploy.

Saw Stephen Fry’s “Bright Young Things” last night, it reaching this part of the world at long fucking last, and enjoyed it immensely. (I could probably pick holes in it if I wanted to, but I don’t. If it seems at all like the sort of thing you might like, see it. Then let’s talk about it, maybe over some absinthe.) Stephen Campbell Moore definitely gets the prize for Aspiring Writer It Would Be The Most Cool To Be As Cool As, beating out, well . . . hmm. I can’t think of any particularly good films about writers ’ve seen lately.

Had weird dreams all last night about partying hard in the blogosphere. (Dream-Wonkette — who looked kind of like the younger, plumper Janeane Garofalo of “Reality Bites”, and not very much like Ana Marie Cox — was miffed when I told her I didn’t enjoy her blog as much after I found out she was paid to do it.) Probably a result of the previous two items.

Got not enough sleep and ate not enough green vegetables.

As I said, further bulletins, etc.

Comments (3)

July 27, 2004

More later.

Comments (0)

July 20, 2004

So I was in a bad mood the last few days for some reason, and spent several hours — spread out over those days — trying to pick fights with people on the Strange Horizons message boards. (I say trying because nobody ever came back after I attacked them.) (I feel kinda bad about that, but only kinda, ’cause they were still wrong. But hopefully they’ll realize that my opinion doesn’t matter, and keep reading and posting.)

Anyway, part of this was, as noted, my mood; but, I realized today, all these posts of mine have a theme. The theme is, people should be free to make up their own minds.

If this sounds dirt-stupid and obvious, that’s because it is.

What gets me wound up, though, is

1. people to whom it’s not obvious;
2. people who think it’s obvious, but don’t realize they’re arguing against it; and
3. people who agree with it in principle but in not in practice because they’re convinced that they, and only they, are in Full Possession Of The Facts.

People like that drive me straight up the wall.

Villains, I say to you now: Knock off all that evil!

And on that note I’d like to bring in this slightly out-of-context quote from Marco Roth:

America is a democracy, and precisely because it is a democracy and not Plato’s Republic, the people are free to make dumb decisions with irrevocable consequences based on imperfect or misleading information.

This should be understood as a good thing.

---

Update: Finally turned up this great Cory Doctorow post that I’ve been wanting to find again for the last several days. I think it’s relevant.

“That guy has too much spare time” is one of the most odious, intellectually dishonest, dismissive things a person can say. It disguises a vicious ad-hominem attack as a lighthearted verbal shrug. The subtext of the remark is that the subject's passions — this remark is almost always directed at someone engaged in some labor of love — are so meritless that their specific shortcomings don't even warrant discussion. The subtext is that any sane person who considers these passions will immediately see their total worthlessness. To direct this remark at someone is to utterly dismiss their personal fire and so their ability to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy.

Comments (9)

July 11, 2004

Six o’clock; there goes another weekend. The tally (with apologies to Harper’s index):

• Distant immediate family conversed with: 2
• Classic Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns finally seen: 2
• Film adaptations of Joe Lansdale Elvis/mummy stories seen: 1
• Chinese dishes found not to travel so well as takeout: 1
• Chinese dishes found to make even worse leftovers: 1
• Loads of laundry done: 2
• Living rooms cleaned: 1
• Kitchens cleaned: 0.5
• Bedrooms cleaned: 0
• New Charles Stross books read: 1
• Appearances of own name found in Dozois’ latest YBSF: 3
• Own stories appearing in Dozois’ latest YBSF: 0
• New wireless cafés discovered: 1
• Long-overdue zeppelin novelettes finished and sent for review by the fine folks of the Rockaway Beach Reunion Workshop: 1
• Future-Tiptree-award-winning planetary romances finished: 0
• Tea house power failures while attempting to post this entry: 1

Comments (3)

July 5, 2004

Florida was hot and damp and flat and green and exactly what I needed, especially the thunderstorms. Ate, drank, swam, played, wrote a little — about twelve hundred words of a story I’ve been meaning to write for maybe ten years; either I’m finally ready for it or the sight of John Kessel’s daughter crowning Matt Ruff with the Tiptree tiara has fevered my brain. I could get used to the lifestyle, if only there wasn’t work tomorrow.

Lots to catch up on. “Fetch” will be reprinted (or, rather, printed) in Strange Horizons: Best of 2003. Nick Gevers reviewed Flytrap #2 for Locus and called “The Ideas” a “deftly conceived allegory of obsession and inspiration”. The proofs for ASZAS are almost ready to go out. And yesterday I got within striking distance of the end of my zeppelin story.

Went to the gym, got the car washed. Things are looking up.

Comments (2)

June 25, 2004

Tomorrow morning I’m flying out to Amelia Island, Florida, where I intend to spend several days lounging around doing nothing. I’ll be off line for about a week; if you need to get in touch with me, well, you probably know my cell phone number, or know somebody who does.

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June 21, 2004

1. “The Fog of War” is a fuckin’ amazing movie.
2. What’s with all the spam I’ve been getting recently about Chinese straw hats?

Comments (4)

June 15, 2004

. . . ’Cause I just bought a calculus textbook.

Of course, if it was a real mid-life crisis, I’d have paid list — $195.00 — instead of finding an old second edition on abebooks.com for forty bucks. But, still.

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June 14, 2004

So, help me out here: What’s the quickest way (with minimal disruption to my day-to-day life; one or two distance-learning or night classes at a time, say) for me to get from point A — three semesters of calculus and one college-level introductory physics class, taken nearly fifteen years ago — to B — being able to follow the math in journals like Classical and Quantum Gravity?

The straightforward way to do this would be to spend the next few years taking about a dozen or twenty college courses starting with single-variable calculus (again) and moving up to differential geometry, with excursions along the way into topology and partial differential equations — not to mention some actual physics.

Unfortunately, even the straightforward way isn’t that straightforward, since no one institution (that I can find) offers everything I’d want to take as a distance learning course or even as an on-campus continuing education course. It could be that the only real way to do it is to drop out of the work force again and spend five or six years getting a Master’s in math or physics; and I’m not sure I want it that badly.

Anyone got any better ideas?

Comments (8)

June 1, 2004

Still feeling a bit fragmented.

I was quite taken with Madison. I don’t know if I’d have felt the same way if it had been February or August; but still, this bears thinking about.

Mostly what I remember is alternating naps with stimulating intellectual conversations. There are worse ways to spend a weekend.

I have this vague idea that maybe I ought to post, or have posted, an hour-by-hour con report, but I’m having trouble concentrating that hard. I apologize.

Also, I’d like to apologize to everyone who wasn’t there for not trying, or not successfully trying, to drag you there.

Also, I’d like to apologize to everyone who was there that I didn’t get to say goodbye to before rushing off to sit in the airport for three hours.

Also, I want a Tiptree Award.

WisCon. It is the best con.

Comments (18)

May 11, 2004

California: Clear, winds gusting to 20mph, highs in the mid-70s, deceptive wind chill making it easy to forget you’re spending all day in the sun. With a little luck my new forehead and ears will be ready by WisCon.

Saw Brandon, Rob, Heather, Tim, Jed, Mom, Carolyn, and “Van Helsing.”

Drank a ten-dollar cup of kopi luwak at the Bean Street Cafe in San Mateo. (It was okay.)

Ate some excellent Mexican food.

Bought too many books.

Didn’t get enough sleep.

I remember this defense
Progress fails pacific sense
All those sweet conspiracies
I remember all these things

I should move back.

Comments (11)

March 30, 2004

I don’t know why, exactly, but I have the feeling I’ve met other residents of this girl’s fantasyland, and maybe spent some time there myself.

But not for a while, now.

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January 29, 2004

Honest.

I must hear some version of this spiel once a month, generally from some self-consciously leftie male between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two desperate to prove his authenticity, present his down-with-the-people, fuck-the-Man bona fides. This despite the fact that Ikea was explicitly founded on the premise of providing well-designed furniture to the masses at affordable prices — a premise that the company still largely delivers on. (If I have a quibble, it’s with quality, not price.)

You know what? I’m done with it. If your life is mediocre, I promise you, Ingvar Kamprad didn't make it that way. You did. And if you’re so desperate for your own soixante-huit moment that you can sit there with a straight face and tell me that you’re being oppressed by flat-packable pine furniture with goofy pseudo-Scandinavian names, I’d advise you to spend a few days working with child slaves in the Sudan, or something.

And Starbucks:

. . . I am also old enough to remember the swill that Americans drank and were pleased to call “coffee” before Howard Schultz swept down out of his damp PNW redoubt and clusterbombed us with franchises. It tasted like soggy cardboard, it was served in chipped diner porcelain that itself generally tasted of soap, and most importantly, with a very few exceptions, it was all you could get anywhere.

 . . .The dynamic at work in both cases is one many of us might recognize from bad relationships: when a deeply wounded person suffering from low self-esteem finally fights back against the various agents of their distress, very often it’s the closest, most sympathetic soft target they lash out at first, in defiance of all logic (or justice).

(Adam Greenfield, via BoingBoing.)

Comments (12)

January 6, 2004

Leaving the damp, mist-haunted shores of . . . New York, our hero returns to the Emerald City, where . . . it’s currently 25° and snowing.

It’s cool, though. It means I can feel smug about wearing my Minneapolis-rated rabbit-fur hat.

New York was a blast, and it’s just as well the Apple borrowed the Emerald City’s weather — less time bitching about frostbitten ears and toes, more time talking shop with Andy and with Deb, drinking with Brandon and Fran, relaxing in Dad’s living room . . . standing in line with several million screaming children in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Can’t win ’em all.

Wow, the guy across the street actually has an ice scraper. Do I feel underequipped.

(Then there’s this suggested list of winter supplies, just received from Andy:

• one can of windigo-repellent
• one blood-soaked parka (for luck)
• one set of German sand-goggles
• one can of black beans
• one book of short stories by Kawabata Yasunari
• one silk glove
• one bottle of absinthe
• one portable hand-held slide-projector of Manet’s winter impressions

Hmm. Wonder whether I can get all that at REI — and whether they deliver.)

Meanwhile, I’ve received two or three overseas electronic submissions for All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, but as yet no paper slush in the P.O. box, just scam artists trying to sell me credit-card processing services. I’d get on y’all’s case about waiting to submit till the last minute, except that I’d probably be doing the same thing.

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December 26, 2003

I seem to have missed the boys from the NYPD choir singing Galway Bay, and all that; no bells ringing out, at least on the way in from Newark airport last night. It’s clear and cold out there, and for this neighborhood rather still. Time to put on my Manhattan disguise and go find some breakfast.

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October 27, 2003

I was kind of hoping there’d be some good news to report if I put off reporting this, but there isn’t, so here goes: Large parts of Southern California, including a part that I grew slightly up in, the part that Lara more seriously grew up in and that her family still lives in, the part Rob’s brother’s family lives in, the parts relatives of mine on both sides live in, and possibly the part Antone lives in, are still burning out of control.

Figure 1. Fires spotted by satellite in the last 24 hours, 3AM MDT 27 October 2003. Image courtesy United States Forest Service.

If anyone can find a better way of tracking the San Diego fires, in particular, than trying to piece a picture together from CHP incident reports, let me know, will you? Lara’s family had been safely evacuated, last I knew, but I still haven’t heard from anyone else down there.

---

Update (8:56 a.m.): Mom’s side of the family is all accounted for, and hasn’t had to evacuate, though aunt Diane’s office may have burned down. Lara’s house is apparently still standing, though the authorities are telling evacuees not to move back in yet in case the wind changes and sends the fire north again. On the other side of the family, still no word from uncle Lance.

It’s not over; it’s still pretty much zero percent contained. It’s just moved on to neighborhoods where I don’t know anybody.

Rob’s got more news on the San Bernadino fire. Like he says, it doesn’t look good.

Comments (3)

October 12, 2003

Back on Pacific Standard Time. Brilliant time in Brussels thanks particularly to Hannah and Malcolm, and also to Mel (and her husband Jan), who hooked up with us for dinner Saturday.

Tired. More later.

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October 10, 2003

London’s getting a little old, though. Next time: more exercise, lighter coat, antihistamines. (And don’t expect to get any writing done.)

Side note: A capsule review of M. John Harrison’s Light: A third of the way through, and I still couldn’t bring myself to care whether any of the characters lived or died. Sorry. I tucked it under the hotel desk, between the phone book and the Gideon Bible. Maybe someone else will get more out of it.

But now, off to Brussels — city of, one assumes, chocolate, impressive architecture, political scandals, and people who speak French but can nontheless count all the way to 100 without having to resort to numbers like “sixty-twelve.” Should be good.

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October 6, 2003

Landed, safe and nearly sound; got to the hotel, cleaned up, came down to Charing Cross Road, bought books, had coffee, had dinner.

Now the trick is just to stay awake until it’s time to go to sleep.

Worst thing about London: The hotels are always, always, about a star and a half down from what they advertise themselves as being. (You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now. Ah, well, at least the sheets are clean. But next time I’m ponying up £200/night for the Savoy — and expecting the McMinnville Best Western.)

Second worst thing about London: Those cretins at Earthlight haven’t put out the new Walter Jon Williams yet. (This is the sort of thing that happens when your SF line suddenly “enjoy[s] the benefits of belonging to the main body of the fiction list” — announcement quoted in Ansible, Aug. 03. Okay, probably it was already scheduled that way, but I’m still pissed.)

Best thing about London: A guy can get away with forgetting to pack his comb, so long as his hair at least lays down flat. (In fact, it makes you look more British.)

Okay, like I said, the trick is trying to stay awake.

Comments (1)

September 20, 2003

Not only is Lost in Translation funny and touching, it nails my home town of record (well, one of them, anyway) almost perfectly.

Plus, you get Bill Murray singing “More Than This” and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” in a Shibuya karaoke bar. What more do you want? Go see it.

Comments (4)

September 18, 2003

Okay, technically it’s a trojan horse, not a virus. But you get the idea.)

I’m getting a lot (like, a pair every five minutes — not sure why it’s coming in pairs) of pretty homogeneous, virus-laden email coming in to dm@chrononaut.org this morning. Since it’s only coming in to that address, I think there’s a reasonable chance that some folks out there with that address in their Outlook/Exchange mailboxes or address books have gotten infected. (It seems less likely that an email virus would be combined with a web screen-scraper, but I suppose it’s possible.) So any of you unfortunate enough to be on That Platform may want to do some virus checking.

And if you’re on Windows and you get an email that claims to be a Microsoft security update (with plenty of realistic-looking content in the message itself, including links and phone numbers) with an attached “patch file” or “audio file”, for God’s sake don’t open it.

A sample:

From: "MS Corporation Security Support"
To: "Commercial Customer"
Subject: Latest Net Upgrade

Microsoft Customer

this is the latest version of security update, the "September 2003, Cumulative Patch" update which eliminates all known security vulnerabilities affecting MS Internet Explorer, MS Outlook and MS Outlook Express. Install now to maintain the security of your computer from these vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could allow an attacker to run code on your computer. This update includes the functionality of all previously released patches.

System requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/2000/NT/XP This update applies to:

• MS Internet Explorer, version 4.01 and later
• MS Outlook, version 8.00 and later
• MS Outlook Express, version 4.01 and later

Recommendation: Customers should install the patch at the earliest opportunity.

How to install: Run attached file. Choose Yes on displayed dialog box.

How to use: You don't need to do anything after installing this item.

(Except maybe kiss your sweet ass goodbye.)

Comments (8)

September 16, 2003

Figure 1. Hurricane Isabel at 19:15 UTC, 15 September 03.

That Coriolis force is some crazy stuff. All of you between the Bahamas and, well, Lake Erie, good luck.

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September 12, 2003

I like it when Product Management is discovering new bugs a week after “code freeze,” half an hour after we were supposed to go gold, and decides that

1. they all need to be fixed before we release
2. we’re still releasing on Monday.

Yeah, that’s what I like.

Comments (8)

September 11, 2003

Courtesy of Electrolite, an interesting (and somewhat depressing) discussion on Kathryn Cramer’s weblog, about the childcare, or lack thereof, at science fiction conventions. (WisCon, at least, is apparently on the ball — as you’d hope.)

An interesting exchange, a few comments into the discussion:

“Alison” opines:

Sorry . . . but as an event planner . . . it wouldn't ever occur to me to provide such a thing at a social event for adults or a professional meeting. I would assume that those who would like to participate . . . would take care of their own children . . . by leaving dependents in the adequate care of someone they trust.

Ms. Cramer herself answers:

One of the significant obstacles to professional women in America is the assumption that professionals never have their children in tow, that to do so is unprofessional.

This is the sort of observation that classic social SF is made of, the observation of a phenomenon that’s so big it’s practically invisible — particularly to the young, single childless male like myself. (But I don’t remember LeGuin or Tepper dealing with it much, either.) As a society we’ve got a pretty good idea of what we mean by professionalism, and I think most of us are in favor of it. But how much of that idea has a real foundation, and how much of it is just arbitrary leftovers from the work and family lives of Victorian gentlemen?

(Side note: Am I the only one who sees in some of the comments a subtext that Ms. Cramer must be either a bad congoer, a bad mother, or both?)

---

UPDATE: Wouldn’t you know, those tireless newshounds at the Onion — or, at least, their editorial staff — are on the case.

Comments (11)

September 2, 2003

Mostly I just skipped straight to the “carouse” part of the schedule.

Seriously, there were apparently various things wrong with the con, but I didn’t notice any of them since I was having too much fun talking shop and/or trash in the bar of the Royal York, prowling the corridors looking for the Secret Plastic Surgery Ward (it’s on B, behind the Ontario Ballroom), and getting to know all the brilliant people at the Second Annual Worldcon Beer & Wings Fest, the Viable Paradise Party, the Strange Horizons / Ideomancer Tea Party, the Strange Horizons Impromptu Sri Lankan Dinner, and the Viable Paradise Posse Impromptu Breakfast. Thanks to all of you for making it a great con.

Figure 1. The Viable Paradise Posse.
(Photo courtesy of Scott Janssens.)

Thanks, too, to everyone who took the time to tell me they’d read and liked my stuff — especially the people I didn’t know who apparently read it of their own free will, without coercion.

And a special thanks to Jay Lake for letting me highjack the second half of his reading — the Greek Chorus was a hard act to follow, but I did my best.

Profound regrets to everyone who wasn’t able to make it this year; you were sorely missed, and everything we said about you behind your back was complimentary. Hope to see you at WisCon or World Fantasy next year.

Comments (13)

August 26, 2003

Note that this is not an exhaustive list; for instance, I don’t intend to miss the Tor party if I can avoid it. But it is a list of everything I have times and dates for.

Further bulletins as events warrant, but probably after it’s too late to do anything about them.

Comments (2)

August 14, 2003

It’s probably not news to anyone that the power is out across half the Northeast, and I’m sure we’ll get reports trickling in from the usual sources before too long. But, not surprisingly, I haven’t been able to get through to any of the folks I know back there by phone. So if anyone’s got any eyewitness reports, let me know.

Comments (4)

August 9, 2003

Will Shetterly has put up a brilliant page with some letters and pictures from his niece Brandi, a US Marine currently serving in Iraq. There’s not much there, but what there is is both funny and touching. I wish all those folks who think you can’t support the troops unless you support the war knew someone like Mr. Shetterly.

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August 5, 2003

You can always look half-smart by making sweeping claims about the general ignorance and foolishness of everybody. But it’s a conservative bet. You’ll never lose a lot, but you’ll never come up with a really new insight, either.

——Patrick Nielsen Hayden, in Electrolite’s comments section

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July 31, 2003

For future reference, Pally “Country” Biscuits are an almost acceptable substitute for McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits.

Fig. 1. McVitie’s Original Digestive Biscuits

Fig. 2. Pally “Country” Biscuits

The texture’s very close; the taste is a little too graham-crackery. Apparently Pally makes a Digestive Biscuit, too; that might be closer. But they don’t sell that or McVitie’s at the local grocery store, so I’m stuck with what I’ve got.

(Yeah, it’s fluff. It’s either that or write about stuff like this. And I’m suffering from outrage fatigue.)

Comments (27)

July 23, 2003

I took a friend to the airport today, and now I keep forgetting it’s not me who’s going to be out of town for a week. I don’t know if that’s wishful thinking, or a “boundaries” problem, or what.

Roughly four weeks till TorCon. I don’t suppose I’ll come back rested in any way, but it’s still something to look forward to.

And at least I’m fairly sure that one is me.

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July 17, 2003

Yes, I’m late. Plenty of crazy news to report — okay, I’m lying; plenty of stuff that I could probably work up into a log entry with a little spin doctoring — but between the day job and the heat wave (ducks to avoid well-deserved smack from Greg) I haven’t been up to doing it right.

Plus, I’ve rediscovered my enthusiasm for the space opera, and I’ve been spending most of my free time getting my detailed synopsis to cover the parts I haven’t written yet as well as the parts I have, so that when I get to those parts I won’t be able to get off the book — er, hook (Freudian slip there) — by saying “But the plot makes no sense!!!”

Anyway; Brandon’s been bitching about the poor organization of my bibliography, and I’ve got some reviews I want to excerpt, so look for an update to the official home page some time this weekend. Meanwhile, if you need something to read, go read this Laurel Wellman article about how San Francisco’s been typecast by Hollywood.

Even San Francisco-set science fiction tends toward the utopian side of the board; let us not forget that the city is home to Starfleet Academy, and by extension an entire universe populated by active people in stretchy garments who can obtain specialty coffee drinks of precisely the temperature and composition they desire merely by speaking a command. Clearly, the rest of the world needs to believe in a manifest destiny that involves the Northern California lifestyle, and perhaps it is not our role to deprive others of such shining hope for the future.

Oh, and if you’re in Seattle this weekend and you’re looking for something to do Saturday afternoon, drop by the Buddhist Temple Bon Odori festival. Me and my colleagues from Cascade Kendo Kai will be putting on a demonstration of Japanese swordfighting (a.k.a. “hitting people with sticks”, as Lara likes to call it) at 4 o’clock. Sharp.

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July 8, 2003

Just got back from a weekend jaunt down to San Francisco (sorry, Mom!), where I worked on my swing, got too much sun, drank too much, listened to too much 80s music, and played too much “Battlefield 1942”. Good trip. (Even if Bob Mould played too much of his new stuff, and ACWLP turned out not to carry Locus and Green Apple didn’t yet have the July issue, which apparently has favorable mentions of “Theo’s Girl” and “Fetch”.) Wish I could quit my job and just hang out in Brandon’s basement.

In between all that other stuff, we went to see 28 Days Later. Everything John Shirley says about it is true. Stylish, well paced, well written, well acted, and just at my tolerance for being freaked out. (I slept okay, but two days later I was still checking the colors of people’s eyes and measuring up the distance in case I had to take them down.) The best thing about 28 Days is that it’s honest: there are twists, but they’re all genuine; no cheap gut shots, just a scary premise scarily presented. Serious zombie movie fans probably won’t like it because it’s not funny enough and doesn’t follow the formula; but that’s okay; serious kung-fu fans didn’t like Crouching Tiger, either. As far as the rest of us are concerned, I recommend it highly.

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June 23, 2003

Rob “aphrael” West has switched over to Moveable Type and moved Bound in a Nutshell to a new URL.

The most important change, of course, is that being as it’s MT, the new, improved Bound supports comments. Go bug him.

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June 4, 2003

According to Electrolite, the author of this weblog, and many of its readers, are only three degrees of separation from Salam Pax.

And anyone who’d read Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle in the Baghdad Sheraton is a friend of mine.

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June 3, 2003

All right, so I played “chicken” with the airlines, and the airlines won — I was hoping that between falling petroleum prices and mounting airline bankruptcies something would happen to cut ticket prices, but it hasn’t worked out that way, and I can’t see how I can swing a trip to Europe just four weeks from now. So, with considerable regret, I’m punting on my plans to go wave the Union Jack at the World Kendo Championships in Glasgow.

That said, I’m feeling guilty enough about all the promises I made that I’d be out there this summer that I have to do something. And as it turns out, a ticket to London in the second week of October costs just about half as much as a ticket to London-and-Glasgow in the first week of July. I have now bought one, so I can’t weasel out of it this time. And that will be my birthday, so I’ll have an excuse.

I’m sorry to be missing the WKC, but I think this will actually be a better trip — less time in airports, more time to see people.

So look for me in Seven Dials in October, if you're there. And hopefully I can still get a couple of practices in — I have yet to miss a Monday night OUKC practice any time I’ve actually been in England.

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June 1, 2003

Okay, if my digital thermometer’s to be trusted, it’s not SARS: my temperature’s two degrees low instead of two degrees high. But it still sucks. I should be writing, but instead I’m sitting around coughing, blowing my nose, playing video games and watching DVDs. And I’m going to have to go to work tomorrow, regardless.

But I got my contrib copy of Say... what time is it? yesterday. That was all right. Not only does it have good stuff in it, it looks good, too — a big hand to the Fortress of Words crew for design and art direction and editorial acumen.

Kelly Link blows the rest of us out of the water, of course. But that’s only to be expected.

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May 29, 2003

Back on the Left Coast for about 40 hours and I still haven’t quite caught up. This was my fourth trip to New York, at four days the second longest, and the first where the temperature was consistently over 50°F. I just can’t get over the place; it’s London and Tokyo and San Francisco all rolled into one.

Doubtless I’d feel differently if I actually had to pay Manhattan rents. But I think by nature I’m either a metropolitan citoyen du monde or a rural college-town eccentric; probably both, in alternating seasons. A provincial capital like Seattle is not, I’m afraid, a very good compromise.

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May 21, 2003

New Amsterdam it’s become much too much
Till I have the possession of everything she touches
Till I step on the brakes to get out of her clutches
Till I speak double Dutch to a real double duchess

—— Elvis Costello, “New Amsterdam”, from the album Get Happy *

Okay; except for this computer, I’m all packed for the Sprawl.

I guess that means it’s time to jack out.

Y’all have fun at WisCon, y’hear?

---

* It was either Elvis or it was Fear’s “New York’s All Right If You Like Saxophones.” And I’m just not that angry.

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May 16, 2003

Some day, when from the luxury of my authorial Fortress of Solitude I can look back on this period of my life with nostalgia, I will have to read this book.

When I wrote the code samples that are in “The Bug,” I sat and then I thought, well, what would these connect to? And there I was, sitting at the MacDowell Colony, ostensibly writing the novel, and whole days would go by when I was just writing code. I actually had a little compiler on my laptop. Finally I thought, this is really a bad idea — code really eats up your time. I thought, I’ll never write a novel if I set something where I actually could write the companion code.

Which reminds me, I still haven’t finished the damn relativity calculator I need for the space opera.

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April 22, 2003

I spent a couple of hours this evening trying to rustle up an author pic for Say... what time is it? and discovered that, one, I have almost no pictures of myself, and two, I like almost none of the ones I do have. (Anyone who’s studied psychology could probably have a field day with that information. Brandon, Susan: go nuts.)

I ransacked the apartment (unsuccessfully) for the original of this picture my mother took some time in ‘99 or ‘00, before Printers Inc. in Mountain View got bought out and started to suck. I dug through several boxes for my old Japanese ID, and couldn’t find that, either, though I probably wouldn’t have been able to scan it at high enough resolution.

But I did find this. It ought to do.

There are at least four lies in this picture. Among them:

1. David does not wear glasses.
2. David is not losing his hair.
3. David can juggle.

I ought to be too young to be playing this sort of game, but what the hell.

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April 16, 2003

• Catching up on “self-inflated neo-pro” gossip with Susan and Heather.
• Touring Blowfish warehouse and being intrigued by repurposing of various industrial technologies for home use.
• Getting strong dose of Cool Brittania at Susan’s favorite trendy soap shop in Union Square.
• Drinking lemonade at SF MOMA café and nearly figuring out beginning of middle of novel.
• Getting worst service ever at former favorite restaurant Park Chow on 9th. (Former due, however, not to service on this occasion, but to removal from menu of bruschetta that, at three-month intervals, served as sole source of vitamin C while living in Japan and England.)
• Finding two almost-suitable-for-mailing ING Barings post cards and one from some trendy gym in the back of The Little Shamrock on Lincoln, and deciding that I can get away with almost this trip, since everyone has Golden Gate Bridge postcards already.
• Listening to Fran’s capsule summary of domestic and international politics, pivoting on wonder at and outrage over stupidity and ignorance of “other seventy percent”. Resolving to hassle Brandon into getting Fran to start a blog.
• Waking to weather suitable only for playing video games. Discovering that Civilization monkey is still on back. Retaining enough will power not to buy Macintosh version of Civ III.
• Nearly freezing to death in Pac Bell Park while watching Giants and Dodgers alternately play beautiful and terrible baseball. (Hot dogs not bad, though.)
• Taking abuse from cabbie for leaving with game tied at top of eighth.
• Watching ninth through twelfth innings in comfort of Brandon and Fran’s living room.
• Seeing Jonathan Rhys Meyers play not particularly creepy character at all in Bend It Like Beckham. Reflecting on advantages adhering to talented actors whose faces do not appear to have rolled off Madison Avenue assembly line.
• Talking futures of scholarly communication and automobile manufacture with Brandon in car on way down to San Jose.
• Failing to interest Mom in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.
• Failing to write post cards until en route to airport Tuesday.
• Discovering that all mail drops in San Jose airport have been removed, presumably for security reasons.
• Mailing aforementioned post cards, including two addressed to Seattle, from my apartment, in Seattle.
• With the help of gin, tonic, muttar paneer tikka masala, and considerable quantity of “World Peace” tea, clearing sinuses and finally figuring out most of beginning of middle of novel.
• Finding that combination of obsolete British safety razor (Wilkinson Sword) and trendy British shaving cream (Lush Razorantium) actually works, unlike combinations attempted last several years.

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April 9, 2003

This is not exactly news. (Teresa noted it ages ago.) But I’ve just heard that a relative of mine with perennial financial problems has decided to compound them by joining one of these things. She’s more than old enough to make her own mistakes, and maybe I should just figure it’s not my problem. But she’s got kids.

My next approach was to question the fundamental premise of multilevel marketing, the sketchy business of selling not a product, but a dream. The conversation was making Mark uncomfortable. I saw a flash of panic in his eyes before they glazed over. Then he said this: “They told us there’d be ripe apples who are ready — who see it. They told us there’d be green apples that weren’t ripe yet. And they told us there’d be rotten apples. ... You're a rotten apple,” he said. There was an uncomfortable silence. I smiled thinly and suggested we both go home.

You can make money in an MLM scheme, if you have the conscience of Al Pacino’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross and the tenacity of Alec Baldwin’s. But this relative of mine isn’t like that. She’s a ripe apple. And she’s going to get picked. Picked, peeled, sliced, steamed, boiled, and canned.

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March 19, 2003

A thousand or so soldiers of the 82nd Airborne have been engaged in “the largest US military operation in Afghanistan since Operation Anaconda just over a year ago.”

Likely, Rob’s brother Brendan is one of them.

Not so long ago, it seemed almost unbelievable that someone I’d met — someone who’d shaken his head at the antiquated music his brother and I were rocking out to at the Laserium show in Golden Gate Park — might shortly be shipping out to an honest-to-God combat zone.

This evening, with the radio nattering about cruise missiles and F-117s, and with 300,000 troops poised to invade Iraq, it almost seems tasteless to bring up the fact that Brendan’s quite possibly shooting and getting shot at — I mean, Afghanistan, that’s so last year. But the war in Afghanistan is no less real than the one in Iraq; maybe more real, as long as our worst fears are’t realized.

---

As for Iraq, I guess there’s nothing to do but get it over with as quickly as possible so that we can hand the place over to the fine people at Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root.

It’s after the [1960] election, and the Democrats win. Kennedy and Johnson are sittin’ in the Oval Office the first day, and the phone rings. It’s the Pope of Rome (Texans used to specify “of Rome,” lest you should confuse him with some other pope) on the phone. He says, “John, my boy, the Vatican roof is leaking something fierce, we were hopin’ y’all might fix it for us.”

“Of course, Mr. Pope, sir. Just let me check with my vice president. Lyndon, the Pope’s on the phone and wants to know if we can fix the Vatican roof for him.”

“That’s fine with me,” says Johnson. “Just make sure Brown & Root gets the contract.”

—— Texas traditional, as told by Molly Ivins

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My mother once told me that her father, a retired career naval officer and a moderate Republican (tighter immigration controls, but also single-payer health care), would be very pleased if one of his grandchildren were to join the ‘establishment’ by becoming a Foreign Service officer.

At various times I’ve seriously considered it. I’m interested in politics, history, and economics; I have a talent for languages; I’m good at standardized tests, so the exam should be no trouble. Travel, glamour, excitement — what’s not to like? What’s stopped me?

What’s stopped me, is the knowledge — given what I know of American history — that sooner or later I’d find myself writing a letter like John Brady Kiesling’s.

It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.

Salon has an interview with him up right now. I recommend it.

Q: What exactly do you mean when you say “the traditional internationalist foreign policy community?” Would that be considered — I hate to put simple tags on it — to have a mainstream political bent? Would it be liberal?

A: They’re mainstream foreign policy people, the ones who believe the United States is locked in a web of international interests and must protect those interests by a combination of unilateral force, but more importantly, by a set of institutions and relationships that we can control. There are very hard-nosed people in this community. But they were convinced that these institutions we set up served United States interests and their perspective has always been based on United States national interests.

It’s a good read; not just on the subject of the current unpleasantness, but on the conflicts between duty and conscience, and between organizational loyalty and professionalism, that are the lot of any honest man who tries to serve a country or a cause governed, in the end, by fallible human beings.

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February 24, 2003

For those of you who know Tehran, Dad tells me my memory of where our apartment was is a little off:

"Actually, we lived just a block north of Takht-e-Jamshid (or however it's spelled), on Kucheh Iranshahr (Iranshar?) ('Iranshahr Alley').

"The US Consulate was up the street (north) on Iranshahr, and the US Embassy was down the street (east) on Takht-e-Jamshid, so we were on kind of a hot corner when any kind of anti-American activity was afoot."

I expected to find they'd renamed Iranshahr, too, but apparently not. There's a hotel on it. It doesn't look half bad, though I've been fooled by hotel websites more than once.

I'm trying to find a decent map of Tehran that I can stick a virtual pin into, but go figure, they're either not detailed enough, or in Farsi. Go figure.

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For those of you who haven't already seen it over at Electrolite: an introvert's manifesto, from those clever folks at the Atlantic.

Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.

One is, sometimes, sorely tempted to kick them. One refrains. One hopes they'll read this article.

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February 22, 2003

These days I only manage to get out to the slopes about once each winter, but I’ve been skiing since I was four or five. When I first learned to ski, we were living in Tehran, a few blocks off Takht-i-Jamshid, now Taleqani Street.

My dad drew this cartoon in 1978, the year we came back to the US. My mom and I had our own skis, my sister wasn’t born yet, and we didn’t bring our own sheep, but aside from that, the cartoon’s pretty close to how I remember it. I’ll let Dad explain:

“The Farsi names... are the three main ski areas near Tehran: Ab Ali (where we all learned to ski), Dizin (where we did most of our skiing) and Shemshak. Our family never actually had a chance to ski at Shemshak, but some of the folks did.

“And, of course, the ‘e’ in ‘eSKI IRAN’ is there because that's how the Iranians pronounced it, as in ‘eSport’ or ‘eStupid’.”

Ab Ali, Dizin and Shemshak are all still open. Someday, when this war is over, I’d like to go back.

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February 10, 2003

From Brendan Beely, Rob “aphrael” West's younger brother, currently in Afghanistan with the 82nd airborne, pictures.

I had a dream a couple of weeks ago, compounded probably from childhood memories of Iran, the month I spent in Granada and Córdoba after Oxford, and Ali Khamraev's The Seventh Bullet.

In the dream, I was travelling through an Afghanistan without the bandits, civil war, not-so-civil war, famine and downed MiGs. An Afghanistan with no more poverty than, say, Estonia. An Afghanistan where you could rent a car in Kabul, head up to Mazar-e-Sharif, maybe drive out to Balkh to have a picnic and see the ruins.

At least I got the mountains right.

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February 1, 2003

The space shuttle Columbia has broken up in the skies over Texas. Its crew of seven astronauts had no chance of survival. Mission control lost contact with the shuttle around 9 a.m. EST (1400 GMT), about 16 minutes before its planned touchdown in Florida.

——Spaceflight Now

When I first saw the news, over at Electrolite, the top of Patrick's story was a note about the fuel tank insulation foam breaking off during launch and the resulting damage to Columbia's left wing.

Silly me, I read that and thought the shuttle was still up there.

I can't describe how it felt to switch gears from trapped astronauts to already dead astronauts. I'm not even going to try.

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