Laying Sookie Stackhouse

We're hooked on the HBO series True Blood, based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. I'd never read the books, but because of the TV show, I bought the first book in the series. I've been struck by the confusion in the book between lie and lay. It's written in past tense and first person, and repeatedly Sookie tells us that she lay her hand or head on his shoulder, that he lay her on the bed, and so on. I think the only thing that gets laid is Sookie herself.

I've heard people complain that standards of English usage have deteriorated, and they'll point to errors in recently published books, such the one I just mentioned, as proof of it. I explain to them that what has diminished isn't knowledge of English, which was never high in the general public, but the number of copyeditors in the publishing biz. As costs were cut (a trend that started as a byproduct of publishing companies being absorbed by non-publishing corporate behemoths, long before the current economic crisis), copyeditors were among the first to go. Twenty or thirty years ago, that misuse I mentioned would have been caught and corrected by a poorly paid copyeditor, and readers would never have known that the author didn't know the difference between lie and lay. (Just in case you're confused, see here.)

Even decades ago, you'd read books with grammatical errors. Those were novels by authors of such stature (i.e., earning power) that publishers would accede to their demands that their writing not be edited. Go still further back, to the early days of mass printing, and spelling and grammar varied wildly from one book to another. Did that damage literature? Weren't all those earlier times part of the Golden Age, from whose heavenly standards we've fallen so far?

In other words, should books be copyedited for grammar and spelling at all? If a writer doesn't know the language, should that be hidden from the reader? Of course publishers want the books they publish to sell the largest possible number of copies, but earlier times had bestselling authors whose grammar was a bit wobbly or at least eccentric. Lots of people bought the Sookie Stackhouse books even before the HBO series, and I bet most of them didn't know or care that the author uses an intransitive verb transitively.

Anyway, isn't it dishonest to extensively massage John Smith's original manuscript and still label it a work by John Smith? At the least, shouldn't publishing emulate Hollywood and have a page of credits reading something like

Nuts to Your Guts

(Catchy title by Ima Serf, Editorial)

A Novel

Story: John Smith
First Draft: John Smith
Draft with corrected chronology: Poor Schlub, Editorial
Draft with fixes to absurdly messed-up character references: Harold "Harried" Braindead, Editorial
Grammar, spelling, and usage corrections: Nameless Freelance Copyeditors
Cover design: Etc.

Dick Whittington didn't have a cat

And he didn't start out poor. The real one, that is, as opposed to the fictional one.

I'm very disappointed. I read the folktale version of his life when I was a kid and loved it. Now, decades later, I just made the mistake of Googling Dick W., and my fond childhood memories are shattered, I tell you, shattered!

On the bright side, just like the fictional Dick, the real Dick wasn't at all a dick.

Until he's forty!

Okay, this makes me feel old.

Then there's Galois, the silly twit.

Smashing two stories together

There's probably a technical term for that, but that's what I call it.

Occasionally, I've found myself with two separate novels in the mental planning stages, and neither had enough to it to make a complete book. So I've played with the idea of combining them, even if they seemed utterly unrelated. In a couple of cases, the two separate stories clicked. I don't mean just that they could be forced to coexist, but that they seemed to be made for each other. I'd say that they illuminated each other, but that sounds too pretentious.

This is different from starting with an idea that contains various subplots. I'm talking about books that were conceived separately, based on unrelated ideas.

The first case that I'm really happy with is my last book, Business Secrets for the Stars, which I still consider the best thing I've written and which I'm now preparing for reissue by a small press, Norilana Books.

The second case is what will probably be my next book, and which I'm thinking a lot about right now but writing very little of so far, the working title of which is Chains. I assure you I won't let a sentence like that one survive in it.

If that works, I'll try smashing three unrelated books together! And then four! Wow! Maybe there's no limit!

Plumbum

When I was a kid in school in South Africa, studying Latin, I was delighted when I learned the word plumbum, lead. What I found so delightful was that we get our word plumbing from it, because the Romans made their pipes from lead (which may have contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Emp.). Of course, that was years before I became a homeowner.

Alternative title for this post: After 40, everything collapses. When we moved into our house, it was a youthful 4 years old, and everything seemed perky and firm. The house is now 40 years old, and it ain't so perky. We started having problems with sewer-line backup via the drain in the basement quite a few years ago, so I guess the house was in its 30s at the time, which shouldn't be old for a house. The main sewer pipe from the house is clay, though, which was common at the time the place was built; it can be damaged by ground shifts or settling. We were warned that the pipe needed to be dug up and replaced, but the quoted price for such a job made us decide to put up with periodic invasions of our basement by ghastly water.

The most recent time was the last straw, though. Mr. Rooter came over to clear the pipe and ran a camera through it. That showed just how many breaks there were in the line. So we bit the bullet and agreed to have the line replaced. That took a week, involving breaking up part of the sidewalk and part of the street, and a backhoe digging a very deep trench from the house to the street. (The house sits above street level, so the sewer line is quite a way down.)

While they were here, I had them do some other fixing up inside the house that has needed to be done and that I decided I'd rather pay someone else to do than do myself. For quite a while, the trap in the basement floor drain has not been holding water, and I asked the Mr. Rooter guy if he thought the trap might have a crack in it. The Mr. Rooter guy said it sounded like it, but that replacing it would require digging up the concrete floor around the drain. I gave the go-ahead because the water in that trap is what keeps sewer vapors from coming up into the basement, and lately they have indeed been coming up. So they jackhammered away, only to find that the metal pipe from the main sewer to the drain was completely corroded away and even non-existent in places. The plumber said he's seen pipes in much better shape in century-old houses and speculated that there might be something in the soil that corroded the metal.

So they had to keep digging up the concrete and dirt along the pipe till they could find a non-corroded part that they could hook the new (PVC) pipe to. Now that's all replaced, along with the floor, and we've cleaned up the basement once again, although at least this time we were cleaning up dirt and dust, not the effects of filthy water. It smells better down there than it has in years!

They did warn us that it's possible that the main line itself is also corroded, although they ran the camera through it and couldn't see anything, so it could be okay. (I.e., the metal line inside the house, not the clay line outside that they just replaced.) At some point, we'll have to have someone dig up more floor and check, just to be on the safe side.

The delights of homeownership. On the bright side, I can remind myself that an Englishman's home is his castle, and not even the King's might can enter without the homeowner's permission. Oh, wait, that was dug up and removed a while ago, wasn't it?

Hard women, soft actresses

This is one of my (numerous) pet peeves.

In old movies, tough guys were often played by wimpy actors. It wasn't a serious problem since they were normally fully clothed. When they did, say, take their shirts off, the tough-guy swagger became laughable. Or at least, it's laughable to our modern eye, conditioned as we are to seeing tough guys played by tough-looking actors with very large muscles. I think we owe that to Arnold Schwarzenegger and the first Conan movie. Sean Connery looked tough in the early Bond movies, but compare him to Daniel Craig and he deflates.

Unfortunately, the same thing hasn't happened with female characters and the actresses who play them. Since nowadays there are more female characters who are supposed to be physically tough than there were in old movies, and since they show much more of their bodies than was acceptable long ago, the contrast between what the character is supposed to be and what the actress looks like can really mess up your willing suspension of disbelief.

I think this is even truer on TV than in movies. Battlestar Galactica is a prime example. The difference between the men and the women is striking. A lot of the actors are, if anything, too muscular for the characters they play; you keep wondering when they have time work out so much. The actresses who play fighter pilots swagger and sneer and posture and threaten each other and generally act as macha and fighter-jock(ette) obnoxious as they can. But their outfits let us see just how wimpy and soft they are. If they were lean and hard, their characters would still be obnoxious, but at least the act would be believable. Instead, it's laughable.

Last night, I watched a taped episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a show I'm increasingly hooked on. The episode, "The Tower Is Tall but the Fall Is Short," was a good one -- well written and acted, and it moved the story arc along satisfyingly. It also introduced a new character, Jesse, played by Australian actress Stephanie Jacobsen. Jesse is yet another refugee from the post-apocalyptic future, a tough soldier. Now, Jacobsen has a face that one can stare at for a long time in delight, but her body, which we saw a nice amount of, is that of a wimpy fashion model. She's no lean, hardened survivor from that future guerilla army. For that matter, Lena Headey, who plays Sarah Connor and is supposed to be just as tough and dangerous as Jesse, is only marginally physically better suited to her role.

What's so annoying about such casting is that it's unnecessary. Los Angeles is famously filled with fitness babes, and I saw lots of them in Vancouver the last time I was there. Surely many of them can act adequately. So whether a series is filmed in Hollywood or Hollywood North, there's no reason for the kind of casting I'm complaining about.

Do audiences not care? Are other viewers not struck by the incongruity? Or are they so unfamiliar with the look of female fitness that they don't even see the incongruity?

(Update. Here's another example - Silk Spectre in the Watchmen comic books and the wimp who'll be portraying her in the movie. The absurdity of having her wear high heels seems to come from the comics.)

(Graphic novel: noun, synonym for comic book.)

The brilliance of Denver drivers

Car crashes into Denver home, driver bolts

Guy knocks over a telephone pole and damages a house so badly that it has to be shored up to keep it from collapsing, then takes off running, leaving his smashed-up car lying on its side, license plate intact. "The cops will never catch me now!"

Maybe it was a stolen car.

Update:

Something is in the air! Last night, in a different part of Denver, a man drove a car into a Vietnamese restaurant.

Apartheid and Old IU

This is something that happened geological eras ago. Yesterday's election and the wonderful pictures and TV scenes of black people celebrating and crying made me think about it again.

I came to the U.S. from Apartheid-era South Africa as a teenager and went to high school in northern Indiana. That was in Elkhart, a medium-sized town that was somewhat rural and farm oriented but was nonetheless part of the Chicago-to-Detroit Great Lakes industrial region. The civil rights movement was boiling into the consciousness of America's whites, but I thought of segregation and race problems as being limited to that strange, alien world known as The South.

Later, I went to college at Indiana University in Bloomington, in southern Indiana. For quite a while, I didn't realize that, while the campus was culturally part of the North, when you stepped outside it, you were virtually halfway across the river into Kentucky.

The incident I'm remembering happened when I was a sophomore at IU, I think. So I was probably 19. That would have been about six years after I came to the U.S., and details about the Apartheid system were far fresher in my memory than they are now. A bunch of us were eating together in the dining hall. The group included one kid from some small town in southern Indiana. Somehow, the conversation turned to Apartheid, which was becoming an issue in America then, especially on college campuses. With a skeptical expression, small-town kid said to me, "It's not really as bad in South Africa for blacks as we hear, is it?"

So I launched into a long description of everything bad I could think of about Apartheid -- the restrictions, the pass system, the horribly inequitable application of laws, the poverty, the squalid living conditions, the privileges and immunities enjoyed by whites, and on and on. As I talked, his eyes widened and his mouth opened. I'm getting through to him! I thought. I felt proud of myself.

Finally I finished. He took a deep breath and said, "That sounds like paradise!"

My new bumper sticker

Actually, rear-window sticker.

I have a black-and-white printer, so unfortunately the smiley face prints as shades of grey:

http://www.dvorkin.com/ThatWon.jpg

Squamous cell carcinoma

If you must get skin cancer, that's the kind to get.

I had one on the top of my head, years ago. So far, no return on that one.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the dermatologist for my regular six-month checkup (a schedule I was strongly urged to get on after the squamous cell carcinoma on my head). I pointed out something on my knee. "Looks benign," she said, "but I'll cut it out and send it to the lab just to be sure." It came back positive, so now I'll be going in "for a little excision," as the voice on the phone put it.

The knee is not a good place to have chunks of you cut out. You have to keep bending it. I think I'll discuss working at home for a while, once that little excision has been done.

Interviewed by NPR

Sort of.

Today, I went over to the main post office in downtown Denver. Outside the P.O., I was approached by a man who identified himself as an NPR reporter and asked if I had a few minutes to answer some questions. He wanted to know where I lived, if I was registered as a Dem or Rep, whom I was voting for, and why. So I babbled on and on about the wonderfulness of Obama and how important it is for the future of America, the world, and the entire galaxy that he be elected.

And that was it. Will it show up on NPR at some point as a Babbling Man in Street Interview? Did he delete it as just too awful? Dunno. I do know that afterwards I realized I should have spelled out my name and the URL of my Web site, and I should have said, "And my books are available on Amazon.com!" Darn.

Why translations should always be proofread

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7702913.stm

E-book readers have no future

E-books have a glowing future, or so I hope, but the buzz about this e-book reader vs. that one vs. the one that's promised for next year is misguided, I think. Why? Because no matter how interestingly e-book readers evolve, they're just a stopgap.

Small(ish), portable(ish) computers - laptops, notebooks, PDAs, cell phones; let's call them SPCs - are also evolving. The need and market for SPCs is greater and more urgent than the need and market for e-book readers, so the evolutionary pressure is greater for SPCs. The current progress in e-book readers is just a byproduct of the technological progress in computers in general and SPCs in particular.

Not too long from now, everything the best e-book reader then available can do will be available in software form on SPCs. Instead of buying an e-book reader, you'll buy (or otherwise acquire) e-book reader software for your preferred SPC. By then, e-book readers will be quaint old electronic gadgets of interest only to collectors.

In which I am referenced in New Scientist

Okay, it's only this:

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn14997-scifi-writers-tackle-how-to-move-the-earth.html

But that's as close as I'll ever get to having a publication of mine referenced in New Scientist!

Sign thieves in the night

Once again, some cowardly Republican pile of shit stole our Obama sign last night. This time, the scum replaced the sign with a McCain sign.

Instead of pulling it up, Leonore went out with a scissors and sliced the McCain sign to ribbons. So it's there, advertising our feelings, next to the Udall sign, which the slimeball didn't steal.

If the mangled McCain sign gets replaced during the night with a whole one, I think I'll try putting a big circle with a line through it, using black marker, unless the marker won't work on that surface.

The Jews control the Federal Reserve

It must be true because a loud-mouthed old man said so.

This was in the breakfast room at the motel we were staying in last week in Santa Fe. The place was crowded. The old man and his wife were sharing a table next to ours with a couple of other travelers. He spent the entire breakfast explaining the world to his tablemates - and the rest of the room. He told everyone that, although few realize it, the Federal Reserve is not a government agency. So far, so good. Then he listed the suspicious last names of the people who were behind setting it up.

"Here we go," I said to my wife. "It's the old 'The Jews control the Federal Reserve' story."

The old guy lectured everyone that the Jews control the Federal Reserve. "So when the government used our money for the bail out," he said, "we were bailing out a bunch of Jews."

Some shit never does go down the toilet.

Hawk in the yard

Or possibly a small eagle. I can't tell the difference, and it was harder anyway because it was a dark, drizzly afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon, I glanced out the kitchen window and saw a very large, raptor-shaped bird standing at the far end of the back yard. It was pecking at the ground, which seemed odd. I didn't think they ate worms. Then I realized that the white stuff surrounding it wasn't mushrooms but feathers. It was finishing off the remnants of some fellow bird.

Nature red in tooth and claw. I hate seeing it, and I hate having to clean up the results. I hate accidentally coming across film on TV of animals killing animals, and it disturbs me how popular such films are on TV.

I wish none of this happened. I wish the lion really did lie down with the lamb. But at the same time, when I go to a Middle Eastern restaurant, I very often order a lamb dish. It tastes so good!

A prediction come true

On political blogs, people sometimes like to point out that they predicted some political development. In that spirit, I would like to say that days ago I predicted to myself that I would post this very post at around this time.

I've been away in Santa Fe

Despite living in Denver for almost 40 years, we've never yet been to Santa Fe. So we decided that would be a good place to spend my birthday.

We drove down there on Sunday and returned today. I hope to have pictures later, unless there aren't any good ones.

Golly

I've been invited to address the Disproof Atheism Society* at Boston University on the topic "Why I Am No Longer a Jew," based on my essay Why I Am Not a Jew.

The previous speakers are a long and illustrious list, making me feel a tad out of place, since I'm neither illustrious nor long. Maybe I could compensate by doing some magic tricks? No, that would be inappropriate. And I don't know any magic tricks.

We were planning a longish trip to the East Coast in May, including a stop in Boston, so it would be nice if I could do the talk during that visit. We'll see if that works out.

* At first, I read the e-mail as coming from the Disproof of Atheism Society and wondered why they had contacted me.

Geek humor

Or nerd humor.

I got a birthday card from the College of natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Houston, where I got my MS in mathematics. On the front, under a portrait of Newton, it says, "If the sun is the center of the universe, and ... " Next, under a photo of Einstein, it says, "If e=mc (squared), then ..." Next, under a photo of Hubble*, it says, "We hypothesize that ..." On the back, against a background of a deep-sky photo showing lots of galaxies, it says, "Your birthday will be a big bang!!!"


* Shoulda been Hawking.

And now give it up for ...

When did "give it up for" replace "let's have a big hand for"? It seems to have happened only a few years ago, and the switch seems to have happened quickly and completely. "Give it up for" strikes me as a very odd expression, although I'll admit that "a big hand for" is odd, too.

Maybe I just wasn't paying attention. That often happens.

Some day, no one will fully appreciate the clever title of that wonderful old comedy Western, A Big Hand for the Little Lady.

My father in "his" synagogue

http://www.tampabay.com/news/religion/article828924.ece

He's annoyed that they mentioned his age. I think I'd be proud of it.

David's Definitions for October 2008

Epicenter

(Will appear in the October 2008 issue of Community News)

Earthquakes don't happen at the surface of the Earth. They originate inside the Earth, often at very great depths, for instance where two of the immense slabs of rock called tectonic plates suddenly slide against each other, or one slips a bit further under another. The place on the Earth's surface directly above the deep point where an earthquake originates is called its epicenter, from the Greek word epi, which means upon. It's not necessarily the point on the surface where the effects of the earthquake are most strongly felt; it's just the point vertically above the real center of the quake. You'll often hear epicenter misused to mean a more intense sort of center. Years ago, I heard a preacher refer to Boulder as the epicenter of various kinds of behavior he disapproved of. That would have been clever if he'd been implying that the behavior was demonic and its real center was somewhere inside the Earth, but I'm sure he was just misusing the word and trying to impress upon us that Boulder was, like, you know, really, really the center of that bad stuff, man.




I'm collecting all of these at: http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Editorializing meteorologists and store music

I like cool, drizzly weather. That's not the PC attitude in Colorado. When someone praises the heat and sunshine, and I grump that I don't like heat and sunshine and prefer cool and drizzly days, Coloradans look at me like I'm crazy and edge away, except for the ones who take me aside furtively and, after looking quickly from side to side, whisper, "Me, too!"

Oh, and except for the ones who say, "You should be living in Seattle." To which I usually reply, "I'd hate to live in Seattle. I should be living in Vancouver." That also gets odd stares, but maybe that's because they think I mean Vancouver, Washington.

This is why I get annoyed when the local TV weather forecasters editorialize about the weather, moaning on the rare occasions when it's going to be cool and drizzly and crowing if, as usual in the summer, it's going to be a sun-drenched furnace. They could praise the weather I like and act upset about heat and sunlight, but that would annoy other viewers, probably most other viewers. Or they could play it safe and just tell us what they expect the next few days to be like, along with the standard overdone graphics behind them to explain why they expect that.

It's the same thing with background music in stores. It tends to be noise I hate, and that makes me want to rush through my shopping list and get the hell out of the place. They could play great opera recordings, and I'd wander through the store in a happy daze, buying lots of stuff I don't need, but some other shoppers would be running for the entrances with their hands over their ears. How about not playing music at all? That's the only choice that's sure not to offend anyone.

The Sarah Palin cult of personality

I'm seeing amazement expressed online that the GOP has built a cult of personality around this embarrassing nonentity. Despite the advance word that she's really smart, she turns out to be a vapid airhead, and yet the GOP has succeeded in creating that COP around her anyway.

Why should this surprise anyone? They did the same thing with Little Georgie, another emptyheaded buffoon. Both Dubya and Palin have forceful personalities and boorish, outtamyway self-assurance. That seems to be all that's required. It was clear during the RNC that the intention was to build such a cult around McCain, but Palin proved to be better material.

It's not just that the GOP is good at building such cults. It's that they need them. On some emotional level, they want the world to be populated by brutish serfs ruled over by semidivine monarchs. (Floating off to the side are the brilliant conservative commentators and bloggers, the only ones who really understand everything.) They need and want someone to worship, or at least to tell everyone else to worship.

I assume they think that all Americans share their sick need. We'll find out in November if they're right.

Who's a pro?

And while we're at it, what's unprofessional?

About a year ago on this blog I whined about seeing myself referred to online as a minor pro. At least I was called a pro. In the genre world, a pro is someone who has published, well, professionally - i.e., in a recognized magazine or has had a book published by a recognized publisher. It doesn't mean someone who supports himself by his writing. That is, professional isn't opposed to amateur but to aspiring (or, more cruelly, wannabe).

Is there a minimum qualification for being considered a pro? There doesn't seem to be. Even one short story in a small but recognized (don't ask me to pin that usage down) magazine makes one a pro. At science fiction conventions and such places, I often encounter young writers who have published one or two stories and who have about them a kind of self-assurance and pro aura that I still don't have.

I suspect that's self-fulfilling. That is, if they project that aura, they're treated as up-and-coming major writers, and some of them eventually become major pros. Is it the quality of their writing? Is it the aura? Damned if I know. I envy such people even as I find myself annoyed by them. Can one learn to do what they do, or does it have to be innate in one's personality? Could I take lessons and end up projecting the same self-image? And would I then become a major pro, or would people wonder who that pompous ass over there is?

By contrast, in the business world, the words professional and unprofessional refer explicitly to appearance and impression. For example, people going for a job interview are advised not to dress too casually (shorts, tank top, dirty hair). They must be professional, which refers to how they dress and how they speak and even what they have on their MySpace page. That is to say, robots get jobs, while individuals do not. Robots are professional; individuals are unprofessional. So the poorly paid guy processing papers and wearing slacks and a dress shirt and wingtips and contemplating suicide is a professional. The highly paid techie a few cubicles away who's wearing shorts and a torn t-shirt and has dirty hair and is overweight and whistles while he works and is churning out brilliant software that will redefine our world is unprofessional. In other words, in the business world, professional isn't really a word at all. Like respect, it's a rhetorical club that means whatever the speaker needs it to mean in order to impose his will.

Then there's business casual, a supremely silly term used to describe a type of clothing that bears as much resemblance to being casual as the military posture At Ease does to actually being at ease.

Doctor effulges, David indulges

Okay, this was an odd psychological reaction.

I went to the doctor today for my annual physical, which came about 1 1/2 years after my last annual physical. Everything was super duper. The few things I was a bit concerned about turned out to be nothing. The numbers are great. The results of the probing and poking are excellent. My doctor proclaimed himself very happy. I felt very happy.

Then I went home and, instead of continuing the good diet habits that led to these good results, I pigged out. This evening, instead of exercising or writing as I had planned, I had too much alcohol and obsessively e-mailed queries to agents.

This is weird. And yet, except for the beginnings of a headache, I feel rather good.

On second thought, it's not weird. It's a combination of relief and letdown. There's a lot of nasty medical stuff in my family, from the inconvenient (enlarged prostate, arthritis), to the scary (heart disease), to the deadly (cancer). So every time I go to the doctor for an examination, I can't help but fear that my moral superiority to my forebears will turn to have been overridden by some nasty gene or other, and the doctor will frown and mutter "Uh, oh" and tell me to make an appointment with a cardiologist or oncologist.

So far, the moral superiority is winning out.

Brilliant argument against self-publishing

Putting it into perspective

That great Western tradition of small government!

David Gregory just referred to that on MSNBC. He said it's the tradition McCain shares with such Republican icons as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan (who was from Iowa, right?).

Yeah, right. The American West, where I've lived for almost 40 years, this land where men are men and horses are surprisingly rare, was built on government handouts and continues to depend on them for survival - from cavalry outposts and virtually free grazing on public lands and virtually free rights of way for the railroads to today's interstate highways and water projects. I don't feel like looking it up, so I'll just assert (because I'm pretty sure it's true) that Westerners receive more government support of various kinds per capita than people in any other region of the country.

I guess we're just better at posturing than those other people.

Yee haw.

Went to Kansas City on a Fridee

By Saturday I larned a thing or two.

Actually, I'd larned both things by the end of Friday, namely that the distance hadn't magically shortened since the last time we drove from Denver to KC, and Kansas hasn't become any more interesting. It's about 625 miles one way, and it's odd to think about the settlers toiling across that distance from the Missouri River to, as they thought, the waiting goldfields in Denver, whereas we drive it in airconditioned comfort, stopping along the way for gas, leg stretching, and caffeine, and grumbling about it taking us so long.

Three of Leonore's sisters live in KC, so we make that trip fairly often. This time, the son and daughter of another sister, who lives in France, happened to be there, so we were able to see them as well. We had a nice time, and I'm glad we went. But, jeez, Kansas is wide! And boring this side of Topeka, which is to say most of the state.

So, watcha doin for the DNC?

Oh, nothing much. How about you?

The Democratic National Convention is being held in Denver, starting in a few days. I was glad when Denver won the bid, in a vague, civic-pride sort of way and also because I bought the claims of the benefits to the city. But the fact that it's being held here doesn't make it any more accessible to me and other Denverites than it would be if it were being held a thousand miles away.

A small group of locals will get tickets to see Obama's acceptance speech in the (absurdly overpriced) football stadium (that the taxpayers let themselves be bullied into paying for, grr). The rest of us who want to watch the speech will watch it on TV. And get a better view of the speaker. We won't be able to tell our grandchildren that we were there -- although we could lie about that.

Streets will be closed. Buses will be rerouted. For all I know, uniformed gunmen with itchy trigger fingers will be stationed on rooftops, on the watch for non-uniformed gunmen with itchy trigger fingers. At least, that's the way it would work if this were a TV show. From that perspective, it's a bit of a bother.

But I'm still glad the DNC is being held here. I'm just not doing anything special for it, and I don't know anyone who is. I'll do something special in November: exercise my right to vote for Obama and against the creepy, wrinkly white dude. (I'm allowed to say that because I'm a white dude with wrinkles.) (But not creepy, I hope.)

Low high!

After a period of hot, dry weather, including a record run of days over 90 degrees and record low precipitation, we've had a few days of steady rain and low temperatures. Yesterday, the official high was 58, which was a record for the date - a record low for a high.

I haven't yet heard anyone say that this proves that global warning is a hoax, but I probably haven't been listening hard enough.

Are your characters fat?

Thin? Medium? Tall, short, dark, light? Bald? Ponytailed? Flexible? Stiff? Do they wear glasses or contacts or neither? Are their voices high, low, weak, strong?

Except in cases where it's germane to the story, or it's a major character, do you specify such physical characteristics? Do you think about them?

I tend not to, and I often think I should. A weakness in my writing is lack of physical description of people and places, with some rare exceptions. This may partly be inherent in writing plot-driven fiction. James Gunn, I think it was, said that science-fiction writers should avoid emphasis on characterization because of the nature of sf. (Or perhaps I'm - ho, ho - mischaracterizing what he said.) Certainly, characterization can be distracting when the plot should be moving along rapidly, with satisfying complications and resolutions. But at the same time, you want your characters to be real and the setting to seem real. It's a balancing act, and I often fear that I come down on the wrong side.

In movies and on TV, no one needs glasses, unless it's to show that the character is a nerdy scientist (knows everything about every field of science but nothing about the opposite sex, of course). No one has a hearing problem, unless it's a plot element. Nowadays, all the beautiful people, and many of ugly ones, come equipped with fearsome martial arts skills. Those are all conventions, but I find them distracting. Real and believable differences would help, even in action movies, and somehow one has to find the right balance so as to have such differences in prose fiction, as well.

Ee tee see

When I was a kid, I learned a lot of words and abbreviations entirely from reading, not from hearing the adults around me use them. (Or maybe they did, and I was just ignoring them.) So I understood what etc. meant from context, but I always pronounced it ee tee see. I didn't know about the phrase for which it's an abbreviation. Later, I studied Latin in school and felt rather silly about ee tee see. (But by that time I was around 12 or 13, so I could look back indulgently at my naive younger self.)

Two more were Yosemite and Thames. As a kid in South Africa, I was of course hooked on comics, but that meant English and American ones, so they were filled with place names I knew nothing about, so I pronounced them phonetically. I once referred to the river as the Thayms and was quickly and scornfully corrected by someone. I didn't have any occasion to mention the character Yosemite Sam, whose name I pronounced Yo-zmyte Sam. (I loved that character and still think he's kinda cool.) Some time after we moved to the U.S., someone mentioned Yosemite Park in my hearing, and a bright light dawned. "It's Yo-semmity Sam!" I said to myself. "That sounds so much niftier!" Or whatever word I used at that time.

There must be a lot of other examples that I've forgotten, and I bet such errors are common with children who learn a lot of their vocabulary from reading and not from hearing the words spoken by the adults around them. I wonder how often such mispronunciations persist into adulthood.

Some sobering statistics

Here's something I came across in the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America (subscription info here):

In 2004, Bookscan tracked 1.2 million book titles. Of these, 950,000 sold fewer than 99 copies. 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. The average book tracked sold fewer than 5,000 copies.

I bet the diplomas r speld reel gud, 2

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Indefatigable horse

This evening, I watched the last part of a Hong Kong action-adventure movie, The Touch. I was hoping it would be dumb fun, but it was mostly just dumb. But that's beside the point. It had, in an important supporting role, an indefatigable horse.

I thought those were limited to American Westerns, but apparently not. The hero and heroine rode this horse across a desert at a gallop, with both of them sitting on him. When they reached their destination, they did all sorts of action-adventurey things while the horse was tethered to a tree (this was on the other side of the desert, I guess; it seemed to be a convenient desert that came and went as necessary) and grazed leisurely. Confrontation with bad guys. Fight scene. Explosion. Bad guys escape. Hero digs heroine out from under pile of dirt (she's still breathing!). They jump on the horse and gallop back across the desert! Or possibly a different desert. Full-out gallop.

That's some horse! He doesn't need water, he doesn't need rest, he doesn't need shade. He can also catch up to the villains' SUVs despite their loooong head start.

On the bright side, the heroine was played by Michelle Yeoh. A.k.a., Michelle Yowza.

Norilana Books announcement

This is showing up in various places online, including Publishers Marketplace. It should be in Locus Magazine, as well.

Vera Nazarian, publisher of Norilana Books, obviously works really hard to get the word out.

Ten years later

Leonore remembered that today marks the tenth anniversary of her mastectomy. What's odd is that we had both forgotten. Especially during the first few years, we were very conscious of the anniversary and that each year meant the odds favoring her increased.

Ten years -- knowing that, I'm breathing a bit more easily today.

So we didn't even have some kind of celebration set aside. Maybe we'll do something special next weekend.

Denvention

I.e., the World Science Fiction Convention, which held in Denver over this past weekend under the name Denvention.

I went, I drifted along, I moped around, I ran into some people, Leonore and I ate dinner with Daniel, Becca, and John Stith on Friday evening, I was on a panel on Friday and attended a couple of panels on Saturday, I came home. It was an odd experience. I think it's better to go to a convention of this level (i.e., World SF Con, World Horror Con, World Fantasy Con) when it's in another city. That's much more expensive, obviously, but you're in the convention hotel and you spend much more time at the actual con. As it was, I had my usual weekend chores -- mainly, all the grocery shopping -- and I squeezed the con in as best I could. When I had my doubts about going downtown to the con, as I did this morning, it was easiest simply not to go.

Denver won the bid to host the 2008 Worldcon two years ago. When I heard that, I was excited, convinced that I would be much further along professionally than I turned out to be. Clearly, I'm not there. For a while, I wasn't sure I'd attend the con at all, but then I decided that that would be silly, given that it's here in town.

On the bright side, I saw various people I normally only see at cons, and some people I didn't expect to see at all, such as a former coworker from back when I was a software developer (happy days!). On the negative side, I missed a lot of people I had hoped to see, and I heard grim news about some local people, leaving me depressed and guilty because my complaint is that I'm not rich and famous, whereas their situations are much more serious. On the third, and grayish, side, I was able to give useful advice to another local acquaintance about reentering tech writing and even about the writing biz. ("Shoot yourself now.") (Kidding.) (Mostly.)

I could ramble on, but I don't want to get portentous, and I'm afraid that would be the next phase of this.

Costco creates bad drivers

Or so I have to assume.

I just got back from a shopping trip to Costco. The store was packed, probably with people shopping early to avoid the heat (predicted high of 100 degrees or more today), and as usual, I was astonished at how many people do things with their shopping carts that they wouldn't do in their cars. Driving on the wrong side of the aisle. Leaving their carts across the middle of the traffic flow while they wander off to find something on the shelves. Stopping to chat or eat free samples, with their carts sticking out into the flow.

To be fair, it's not just Costco. I see the same thing in the regular supermarket, where I'll be going in a couple of hours. Interestingly, it's almost always women who do these things. Male shoppers seem to drive their carts much more rationally. I expect some disagreement with that statement.

Maybe it's not the carts that do that to people. You do see the equivalent strange behavior when people are driving cars, so maybe the dangerous cart drivers I'm complaining about are actually the same people I have to watch out for while driving my car in Denver.

Orson Scott Card's non-fiction side

Opinions he doesn't express in his fiction:

http://mormontimes.com/ME_blogs.php?id=1586

David's Definitions for September 2008

Eponymous

(Will appear in the September 2008 issue of Community News)

An eponymous person is the person something is named after. For example, Hamlet is the eponymous protagonist of Shakespeare's play of the same name. Queen Victoria is the eponymous monarch who reigned during the Victorian age. Andrew Jackson is the eponymous American president whose political philosophy is known as Jacksonian Democracy. The practice of using a famous name to refer to something is ancient, but the word eponymous only dates to the middle of the 19th century. What's curious is that in recent times, the word has begun to be used to refer to the thing being named, instead of to the person. If opera singer John Hugevoice puts out a CD named John Hugevoice, you might hear the CD referred to as eponymous. But that's hugely wrong. It's the man who's eponymous, not the CD.




I'm collecting all of these at: http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Zombie Harmony

There really is a site for everyone on the Wonderful World Wide Web.

Even zombies looking for love.

It's not an ethnic pejorative

It's the very odd nickname for a piece of electronic equipment.

For uncounted ages, a microphone was commonly called a mike. Some time during the last few years, everyone started spelling that short form mic. I don't know how that slipped by me. (It's my fault! I was asleep on guard duty!)

Why the change? It makes no sense. Mic should be pronounced mick, whereas mike is a sensible phonetic spelling. Did someone decree that mike was out out because the full word isn't spelled mikerophone? If that's the argument, then why don't people ride bics instead of bikes?

("Because if they did they'd risk getting burned in an awful place" is not an acceptable answer.)

Every presidency begins with an affront to the Constitution

The presidential oath of office is specified in Article II, Section of the Constitution: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Article VI, Section 3 decrees that "[N]o religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Yet we can be sure that whoever wins the upcoming election, on January 20, 2009, he will place his hand on a copy of the Bible (the press will make much of the history of that particular Bible; if the winner is Obama, rumors will circulate that a Koran was used instead) and will repeat the above oath, adding to the end of it, "so help me God," a phrase that the framers of the Constitution were careful not to include. The cheering of the crowds will drown out the sound of the Founding Fathers rolling over in their graves.

Countdown to the end of the world!

With the skeery Large Hadron Collider activation counter.

Except that the date they were assuming when they set that up turned out not to be the actual date for activation of the LHC and Destruction of THE WORLD! That was delayed. But stay tuned, because the counter will be updated. Thus you will be kept informed and will have time to get all your affairs in order.

On second thought, why would you bother?

Leaden Man: A movie review

Also known as "Iron Man", this is a little-boy flick disguised as a guy flick that pours the prodigious acting talents of Robert Downey, Jr. into a metal suit, where it hides them so well that they're mostly invisible even when he's not wearing the suit. Actually, when he's not wearing the suit, Downey seems more interested in showing off his brand-new muscles than in acting. The movie wastes Gwyneth Paltrow in a role she should have been ashamed to accept; could she possibly need the money that badly? The only actor whose reputation might be enhanced by this is Jeff Bridges, who spends the movie chewing a cigar and the scenery with equal gusto.

Downey plays absurdly brilliant weapons inventor Tony Stark. Kidnapped by bad guys in Afghanistan, he escapes by building himself a heavily armed metal flying suit from those high-tech scraps that apparently fill the mountain caves in that part of the world. After getting back home and undergoing what must be the most fuzzily defined moral crisis in movie history, he builds himself a much more advanced version of the same metal suit and sets off to save the part of the world that the weapons made by his company have heretofore been used to destroy.

Along the way, we see astonishingly advanced robots and Artificial Intelligence software, created by Stark but used mostly for plot convenience and comic relief. But these are inventions that would have transformed the world far more than any of Stark's weapons could, and would have made him far richer, too. Or, if he really did want to destroy things, then instead of a suit for a man, Stark could have used the robot and AI technology to create very small robots that could have infiltrated any enemy position or country undetected and done all the damage required. The scriptwriters don't seem to have realized this. That shows you how focused they were on blowing things up instead of thinking about the story.

The politics of the movie are very strange. Stark realizes how much damage his weapons have done to civilians, but no blame is attached to the U.S. government, which has murdered thousands of innocent Afghan civilians - in the movie, by using Stark's weapons. Nor do the moviemakers seem to want to blame the vile Taliban, who are mysteriously absent from the story. Instead, they invent a third group of unnamed terrorists who are killing civilians and Americans and anyone else available, who seem to have no connection to any of the real factions in Afghanistan, and whose goal apparently is to use Stark's weapons to conquer the world. They're led by a sinister figure who speaks English perfectly and thinks deeply and should be a great villain except that, when the plot requires it, he turns out to be absurdly easy to eliminate.

That scene must be one of the worst anticlimactic letdowns in action-movie history, just as the scene in which we learn the identity of the bad guy who is behind everything, and which should be a stunning revelation, instead elicits a no-shit-Sherlock response from anyone in the audience with an IQ above 60.

But this movie isn't aimed at them.

Two stars for the CGI, which are undeniably cool

The Armed Society

There have been a few shootings in Denver lately. In one incident, two cars were firing at each other, and a bullet hit an eight-year-old girl playing nearby. She'll live, fortunately. The police caught the shooter, and a local TV station interviewed him in jail, where he's all weepy and remorseful, explaining to us that it wasn't intentional, that he would never have shot at a little girl. He, his girlfriend, and their eight-month-old daughter had been in a nearby park when he got into an argument with some men, one of whom is his cousin. He, his girlfriend, and their daughter left, but as they were getting ready to drive away, his cousin pulled up beside them.

"And he pulled out a gun," the weepy perp told the camera, mimicking putting his hand in his pocket and pulling out a gun. "Like this! So what was I supposed to do? I had to protect my family. I had my little girl in the back seat. I couldn't just pull over and let him shoot at me. So I pulled out my gun." Mimicks pulling gun from pocket, pointing it. "I put it out the window and went bam, bam, bam, just like that." Bursts into tears again. "I didn't mean to hurt the little girl! It wasn't intentional! I'd never do that!" He was just trying to kill a grownup, which would have been okay.

Libertarians like to say that an armed society is a polite society, quoting one of their heroes, Robert H. Heinlein. Noooo. An armed society is a society splashed with blood, littered with corpses, and filled with broken hearts.

In my ideal society, neither of those men would have had a gun. And each of them would have had a vasectomy.

Update: On the way to work this morning (Thursday, 6/26), I saw a local paper in a vending box with a headline reading that the shooter in the above story has a felony (conviction?) and therefore should not have been able to get a gun. This illustrates a whole separate problem. We need to agree on what laws to have, but they also have to be enforced; gun control laws seem to be particularly susceptible to not being enforced.

Update 2: This evening (also Thursday), there was a story about a local one-car accident. The car rolled multiple times, for some reason. The driver was thrown out and severely injured. But the car then rolled into the path of a freight train and was smooshed. So if he had been wearing his seatbelt, he'd have been smooshed too! From which we conclude that drivers shouldn't wear seatbelts, right? No. We conclude that that driver was a very, very lucky idiot. The relevance is that whenever someone does defend himself against bad guys with a handgun, certain types say that that shows that handguns are the best defense for the individual, and never mind the far greater number of innocents who get killed by idiots or bad guys with guns. I call that the Adolescent Red Dawn Fantasy Bullshit argument.

David's Definitions for August 2008

Goldbrick

(Will appear in the August 2008 issue of Community News)

Nowadays, this generally refers to a person who doesn't do his part, a loafer, someone who shirks his work. In earlier days, especially during the World Wars, it usually referred to a soldier who didn't do his part of the work. It can also refer to an investment that looks good but turns out to be worthless. Supposedly, the word originated in late 19th-century America, when people were fooled into buying bricks of gold that were only gold on the outside. In World War One, new recruits were sometimes promoted to lieutenant before they knew what they were doing, earning the scorn of their men and being called goldbricks because of the color and shape of their insignia. From there, the term became general, first for lazy soldiers and then for lazy civilians. Personally, I think this story smacks of folk etymology and we'd know the real origin of this word if the etymologists would just stop goldbricking.




I'm collecting all of these at: http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Bread and Circuses, without the Bread

It's my impression (subjective, so it could be wrong, but of course I don't think it is) that sports coverage has been increasing on national and local radio and TV news broadcasts. Increasing, I mean, both in saliva-spraying intensity and in the percentage of the average news broadcast consumed by sports nonsense.

I hate sports, and I'll admit right away that, despite my general commitment to a philosophy of living and letting live, if I were king of the world (if only!), watching or discussing sports would be outlawed for anyone old enough to drive. If they wanted to discuss the latest exploits of people who kick or hit or throw balls of various sizes and shapes, adults would be forced to gather in dark, dank, garbage-strewn alleys and talk in murmurs - until the Royal Vice Police swooped in to brutally arrest the perverts and ship them off to reeducation camps.

Be that as it may, sports exist, as they always have and - sigh - probably always will. But why is an ever greater chunk of what is supposed to be broadcast news being devoted to them? Why is it displacing real news, even the fluffy, local stuff? Why are sports statistics referred to as history and the outcomes of games given more weight than major political events?

Ask a Roman emperor. Sports news is our bread and circuses, but without the bread. The aim is to fire the viewers up about something they can feel involved in, to delude them that they can win, albeit vicariously, or if they lose, they can feel hope for next year. That idea isn't new, but the increase in the emphasis on sports is. The news media seem to feel that ever more misdirection is needed. It makes me wonder what they think may be coming, in this empire of ours. Or perhaps they fear that reality is seeping through, as in a Philip K. Dick story, so they have to shout louder and longer to mask it.

An open letter to the un-American coward who stole our Obama sign

Some time during the night of June 10, you stole the Obama sign from our front yard. It's a small matter, and we'll replace it easily enough. But your action signifies something much larger.

I have no idea what your politics are, although it's reasonable to assume that you oppose Barack Obama becoming president. What's important, though, is that I imagine you consider yourself a patriot and that when you stole our sign, you thought you were acting in the interests of our country.

I invite you to think about that.

Dictatorships of both the left and the right commonly have in place almost all the machinery of democracy -- parliaments, congresses, prime ministers, presidents, elections, vote counting, inaugurations. The crucial item that is always missing is a political opposition with the freedom to campaign. You have just declared that that's what you want for America.

Is that the act of a patriotic American, of a believer in democracy? If you want to suppress those who differ from you politically, then at least be honest with yourself: never stand during the Pledge of Allegiance, never salute the flag, never celebrate the Fourth of July, never call yourself a patriot, never praise the Founding Fathers. Above all, never claim to support democracy or to believe in the idea of America that inspired so many before you.

I'll see your Arnold and raise you a Jennifer

I keep getting in strange arguments, on liberal Web sites, with liberals, about the absurd Constitutional provision prohibiting naturalized citizens' becoming president or vice president. I expect xenophobia on the right, but I'm always surprised when I encounter it on the left.

Not that I want to run for president. A short, fat, bald atheist who hates suits and ties and would tell reporters that his personal life is none of their fucking business wouldn't have a chance, no matter where he was born. And if I somehow won, I wouldn't want to live in Washington - although Little Georgie has shown that that's not necessary. I certainly wouldn't want to answer that damned telephone at 3 a.m. "Mr. President! Mr. President! India and China are lobbing nuclear missiles at each other! Millions of people have already been incinerated! Radioactive clouds are drifting all over Asia! Non-combatant nations are putting all their forces on high alert! Your commanders are clamoring for instructions! Do you want to order the End of the World?" "Go awaaaaaay! Ten minutes' snoooooooze!"

The point is, I want to be able to run for pres or veep, if madness suddenly overcomes me. I don't want to be told that I'm not the equal of other citizens. I don't want to be told that a walking anal sphincter such as Little Georgie or Reagan the Abominable is legally qualified to run for president but that the Constitution says I'm not allowed to do so. Yes, that would mean that Arnold Schwarzenegger could run for president. And why not? It would also mean that Jennifer Granholm could do so. Or do liberals fear that Granholm, who was born in Vancouver, BC but moved to the U.S. when she was four years old, has divided loyalties? When no real Americans are within hearing, does she end her sentences with "eh"? If she became president, would she set in motion the secret plan to deliver us into the hellish hands of Canuckistan? (And why would that be bad?)

Suppose the Constitution required that, to be president or v.p., you had to be male. I hope that would have been amended away long ago. The natural-born requirement is no different. Whether or not it was justified in the 1780s (it wasn't), it certainly stopped being justified by, say, the 1840s.

Ah, well. Xenophobia and nativism have always been popular in this nation of immigrants.

Blogger's New Template

It's an improvement, and I need to switch to it and update my blog links. But it's going to be messy and painful, so I keep putting it off.

If vast numbers of people read this blog, maybe I'd feel obligated to make such changes. Or not.

Update: I updated. Now I'm wondering what I missed. Or screwed up.

Clueless about George III and 1776

On the political blog Dailykos, a poster quoted the famous entry for July 4, 1776 from George III's diary: "Nothing important happened today." As is so often the case, this was described by the poster as evidence of King George's cluelessness. The American colonists' declaration of independence! Nothing important!? Ho, ho, ho! Silly old king!

The really clueless ones are those who think that news traveled across the Atlantic instantly in 1776. It didn't even travel all that quickly across the colonies or across England, let alone across 3,000 miles of water.

Also, it's usually not clear at the time how important an event is. Sure, contemporaries can see the significance of major military victories or defeats, or major assassinations. Pompous declarations are another matter. Those happen all the time during unsettled times, and most of them come to nothing.

There's also an irony here. Suppose news had traveled instantaneously in 1776. If George III had heard right away about the gathering of those treasonous colonists for the purpose of announcing their renunciation of George's rule, he would have instantaneously sent orders to the appropriate commanders in the colonies, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence would have been rounded up and hanged. Later, the British would have known about the desperate situation of Washington at Valley Forge. Cornwallis would not have been trapped while waiting for a naval evacuation that wasn't going to happen. The very slowness of communication was a major reason that the American Revolution got started and succeeded.

Urdu!

This is nifty. I just got this e-mail:

sir !! we have done a job of translation of your beautiful article "why do we artice"? in urdu language.I am editor of literary serial niqaat which is leading journal of urdu world from pakistan. your article is very beautiful.we want to send you a copy of this issue.where?

please send your postal address.we proud to translate your article in urdu.

there is much praise over this.
QASIM YAQUB
URDU LITERARY JOURNAL 'NIQAAT'
FAISALABAD.PAKISTAN

The essay he's referring to must be this one.

I've had novels republished in Italian, German, and Hebrew. Not long ago, as I posted about on this blog, an essay of mine about the joys of being unemployed was translated into Turkish and posted on various Turkish Web sites. This is the first time anything I've written has been translated into Urdu.

Not that I can read any of the translations mentioned above, of course. But it's nifty to look at them, anyway.

500 years of experience between them!

This really bugs me. I see companies advertising how many years of experience each of their principals has, and then those years are added up, and the ad says something like, "They have 530 years of experience between them!" *

What strange logic. Experience isn't cumulative in that way.

Consider:

Heinz Wolfsburger has been working on Volkswagens for 30 years. He's taken courses on various VW models in Germany. He eats and dreams Volkswagens. He can resolve problems with Volkswagens that cause the experts at VW HQ to throw up their hands and drink too much beer. (Fortunately it's German beer, so that's okay.)

Meanwhile, on Facebook, a group of 1,000 Facebook friends, all of them 13 years old, and each of them with six months' experience tinkering with cars of various sorts, decide to form a virtual company named SomeDumbNameInvolvingDigitsAndTheLetterZ, or SDNIDATLZ. They create a snazzy Web site, advertising that they have a cumulative 500 years of experience fixing cars!!!!!

One day, your Volkswagen starts making strange noises and exhibiting other strange symptoms. Who ya gonna call? The pitiful wimp with a mere 30 years of experience, or SDNIDATLZ with 500 years!!!!



* Grammarians would say that, assuming there are more than two principals, the word should be "among", not "between", ** but never mind.

** American *** purists would insist that those commas should be inside the quotations marks, but never mind.

*** I was taught by South African purists.

David's Definitions for July 2008

Apocryphal

(Will appear in the July 2008 issue of Community News)

In ordinary use, this word means false, spurious, or doubtful, especially when referring to stories about the past that almost certainly never happened - for example, George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and then refusing to lie about it to his father. It comes from a Greek word meaning something that is hidden away. Originally, around 500 years ago, it referred to books of magic or other special, supposedly sacred knowledge that was to be kept hidden away from ordinary people. During the 16th century, European scholars were trying to decide which books belonged in the Bible - i.e., were to be considered canon - and which ones didn't. A lot of very strange books were proposed and rejected, especially books filled with magical stories - apocryphal books. During this process, apocryphal took on its modern meaning. The word also has a non-negative meaning, however. Certain books were felt to be religiously important but not truly canonical; collectively, these were called the Apocrypha. (Precisely what books those are has varied over time and varies from one religious group to another.)




I'm collecting all of these at: http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Ghastly Excerpt

Galleycat has an item about a new novel, an excerpt from which made galleycat eager to read the whole novel. The excerpt is here.

I feel compelled to offer my own literary reaction to that excerpt: Barf!

Snoot

Apparently, only blacks and snooty white folk vote for Obama. According to some Clinton spokeslime, anyway.

Well, I'm white, and I admit that I'm occasionally snooty. Oh, all right: often.

So to that slime, I have this to say: "Snoot."

Space is big

Really big.

This animated gif compares the sizes of various bodies, starting with Earth and ending with the largest known star.

Very kewl.

http://www.techdo.com/images/largest-know-star.htm

Very Clever Parody

http://www.hillaryis404.org/

(Referring to http://www.hillaryis44.org/)

A Paucity of Posts

Because I don't have anything to say.

I'm home sick today, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to unpauce.

But I still don't have anything to say.

David's Definitions for June 2008

Sanction, Cleave

(Will appear in the June 2008 issue of Community News)

These are interesting words that are famous because each has two diametrically opposite meanings.

Cleave, from an old Germanic word meaning to stick, can mean to stick to. The Bible refers to a man "cleaving to his wife." But another old Germanic word gives us the meaning of cutting apart - for example, a cloven hoof, meaning a hoof that is split in two.

Sanction, from the Latin sancire, to make holy, can refer to approval or disapproval. The world can sanction Iran's nuclear program by saying that it's peaceful and can go forward, or the world can disapprove of it and impose sanctions.

It's a good thing we English speakers are so logical, orderly, and rational. Otherwise, words like these would get us all confused - which comes from a Latin word meaning to mix together, which certainly describes these two words.




I'm collecting all of these at: http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Heinz von Jaegermann, War Hero, Political Candidate

One of the sons of an old Juncker family, he joined the Luftwaffe in the 1930s both to carry on the family's martial traditions and beause he thought that would be simultaneously a way to serve the Fatherland and a good foundation for a later political career.

Unfortunately, he turned out to be a crappy pilot. Fortunately, Germany was so hungry for men eager to drop bombs on England that they put him in a cockpit and aimed him westwards.

What fun he had! London, that enormous city, was nothing but targets. He could drop his bombs anywhere and be sure to hit something. He loved the way his exploding bombs lit up the city streets below him, defying the blackout. Of course, most of what he hit was residential areas, and most of the people he killed were civilians cowering in fear. Don't quibble. Heinz hates quibblers.

Sometimes, continuing west from London, before turning south to return to the airfield on the Continent, Heinz's bomber would thunder over the small city of Reading at the edge of the defensive ring of searchlights and anti-aircraft guns surrounding London. Heinz never had any bombs left by then, or he would have dropped them there, just for amusement.

And a good thing, too, for the pregnant mother cowering in the basement of her house with her two sleepy little daughters beside her.* Her husband had put on his helmet and air-raid warden's armband when the sirens went off and had left to patrol the streets, looking for cracks of light showing through blackout curtains or people wandering the streets who shouldn't be.

As we all know, the war itself didn't turn out well for Germany. But Heinz did quite well. Decades later, old and doddering and arthritic and prone to the occasional senior moment, Heinz has risen to the leadership of PESP, the Posturing and Empty Symbolism Party. There's a good chance that, after the upcoming election, he'll be Germany's chancellor.

Some Germans are outraged. How, they ask, can we choose as our face to the world a man who dropped bombs on innocent civilians during an evil war of aggression? But others, wearing little flag pins on their lapels, respond with fury that any man who wore the uniform of his country in time of war is to be honored as a hero, no matter what. All military service, they insist loudly, is honorable. No matter what.

Fortunately, Heinz does not exist. He's purely fictional, and if he did exist, such a man could never have any chance of attaining the highest elected office in an advanced, civilized country.




* And a good thing, too, for the baby she was carrying, who grew up to write this blog post.

40th Wedding Anniversary

Today. I'm taking the day off from work so that I can ... stay home and work on taxes. Leonore's at the campus for a standard day of tutoring.

We'll go out for an early dinner this evening - early, because we don't do the late-night thing, these days, or not intentionally.

We had big plans for this anniversary, involving a long vacation in New Zealand, but we've had to lower our sights and so, instead of NZ, we'll be going to Ted's Montana Grill.

In the past, for major anniversaries, we've put on fancyish duds and gone to expensive places and paid absurd amounts for mediocre food and pretentious service. We thought we'd try something more middle of the road and reliable, this time.

Forty years! It does seem strange and not quite real. Forty years ago, we were just a coupla crazy kids, and it seems like we're still just a coupla crazy kids with achy knees.

Name This Book - a contest

My wife's book about her experience with breast cancer will be reissued by a different publisher next year, and she needs a new title for it. She's been wrestling with title possibilities, including many suggested by friends and relatives, and has yet to find one that really clicks. So she decided to ask billions of total strangers for help.

For many more details, please go here. Her e-mail address is at the top and bottom of that page.

Thanks.

David's Definitions for May 2008

Toe the Line

(Will appear in the May 2008 issue of Community News)

To toe the line is to fall in line with a group and to follow its rules and customs. Linguists think it originated in the 19th Century, from athletes putting their toe to the line at the beginning of a race. In some old books, the phrase toe the mark is also used, with the same meaning as toe the line. Another suggested origin is from navies having sailors line up with their toes at the line formed by one of the deck planks. Tour guides at the House of Commons in London claim that the expression comes from two straight lines drawn on opposite sides of the room. They tell tourists that, back when gentlemen wore swords, when parliamentary discussions got too heated, the Speaker would shout, "Toe the line!" The Members would have to stand behind the two lines, which were deliberately painted more than a sword's length apart, so that the only blood drawn would be rhetorical. It's a great story, but the present House of Commons was built after World War Two, the older one having been damaged in the air raids, and old paintings of Parliamentary meetings from the days when men did wear swords don't show those lines, so that tale is probably untrue. You'll often see this phrase misspelled as tow the line, which is incorrect and makes no sense. Perhaps people think of barges being towed, but then the phrase would refer to a heavy burden, not to falling in line.



I'm collecting all of these at: http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

The Insatiable

There was a vampire movie on the Sci-Fi Channel last night called The Insatiable. It was made a couple of years ago, but I hadn't heard of it before.

I read the plot summary, hoping it would turn out to be an unauthorized movie version of my vampire novel, Insatiable, in the hopes that I could pull a Harlan Ellison and sue for some huge amount, or more likely some very moderate amount.

I didn't really expect there to be a connection, and there isn't. The title is a coincidence. For that matter, Insatiable wasn't my title for the book; the editor chose it.

So there goes my mansion in Vancouver!

Dissolving in Solutions

When I was a lad, by cracky, well maybe a bit oldish to be strictly called a lad but never mind that, I was a member of the awesome, godlike clan of techies known as computer programmers because we programmed computers by writing computer programs, and people bowed down to us in the street and threw money at our feet and sacrificed virgin goats to us and beautiful women threw themselves at us, panting. Slight exaggeration; the goats probably weren't virgins.

Then some of us became programmer analysts. For a while, I was even a Senior Analyst. Lord of the World! (For a certain very limited definition of lord. And world.)

Still later, some became (software) engineers, and some became developers, and some became architects. That's all silly enough, but title inflation is common in all professions. Even the profession I'm now ensconced in, technical writing, isn't immune. Some tech writers are information developers. Are there also documentation engineers? Senior, junior, mid-level documentation engineers? Senior enterprise documentation architectural engineer? I wouldn't be surprised, but don't tell me, cause I don't wanna know.

So job title inflation is to be expected. What I didn't expect was product title inflation, although I should have. Computer programs became applications. Some of them grew into suites. Some effloresced into enterprise suites. (Enterprise. That's another one. Don't get me started.)

But even that wasn't enough. Nooooo. The marketeers had to pretend to earn their excessive pay. So they came up with solution. Now any bunch of code, no matter how buggy, how infuriatingly uncommented and clunkily architected (Yes! That's a word, in the solutions biz!), is now a solution. Because it solves your problems, you see! Isn't that brilliant? Doesn't it give you shivers? Doesn't it just make you want to puke?

Back during the days of the Apollo Project, marketeers picked up the term systems and started applying it to all sorts of commercial products. Instead of buying blinds for your windows, you bought a blinds systems. But even that wasn't enough. Noooooo. Now they've picked up on solution. I've seen window blinds advertised as window blind solutions.

In a way, it's appropriate, because, as the title of this post points out, in addition to being something that solves a problem, a solution can also refer to the dissolution of something that was previously solid. Such as brain cells. Remember: Every time someone uses the word solution to you in this marketeering fashion, some of your brain cells will dissolve. So do what those poor, virgin goats couldn't do: run away.

Local Stupid TV Sports Newscreature Oxymoron of the Week

"Important game."

Google Easter hits ramping up

Google hits on this blog and my Web site with "Easter" in the search string have been getting more frequent over the last few days. This morning, there was one with the search string: "Do Jews celebrate Easter?"

Groan.

The Might of the Meteorologist

It bugs me when TV weathermen say things like, "We'll try to keep the snow away on Wednesday." Or, "We kept the rain away, and now we'll see about getting those temperatures up for tomorrow." Nature isn't in control, they are! The mighty meteorologist is standing guard!

It also bugs me when they talk about a front "working its way" instead of moving. "This big cold, wet system is working its way over Utah now, heading in our direction." It may be moving, sliding, meandering, but it's not working.

Oh, but now I understand: fronts and systems have to work their way because they have to fight against the defenses erected by the TV weathermen. All that stands between us and inclement weather is the Might of the Meteoroligist!

I was saved from wolves by Obama supporters

I was driving along a dark, rutted, two-lane road in the wilderness a couple of nights ago when all four tires blew out simultaneously. Of course, I stopped and got out, filled with despair, to survey the damage. My flashlight revealed that the road was covered with nails!

Then I heard wolves howling! A pack of them was circling, preparing to rush me and tear me limb from limb!

Just at that moment, another car pulled up, ingeniously avoiding the nails. Five men jumped out. While one held the wolves at bay, snarling horribly at them, the other four swept the nails off the road and replaced my tires with spares they had brought with them. I was saved!

They refused to accept payment. "If you want to thank us," the four said together, "just vote for Obama!"

"What about you?" I asked the fourth man, the brave fellow who had faced down the wolves.

"I'm an Edwards guy," he said, a note of sadness in his voice. "But -- " he shrugged " -- you know."

"I hear you, brother," I said.

Then we all drove away.

I'll always wonder if those wolves were intelligent enough to scatter those nails, or if it was done by Hillary Clinton. I guess we'll never know.

Why machine translation doesn't work

And why competent human translators should still be used, as illustrated by this e-mail:

Good time of day. You are disturbed by the charitable company Redd Cross of Slovenia. We have the business offer for you. We can offer to you of earnings, thus your salary will make from 1000$ to 2000$ per one month, at an incomplete working day. Your earnings can be and higher. The more and forces you will give time, the there will be your salary more. If it is interesting to you, you write on the address of e-mail of our agent: manager_on_connections@yahoo.com he will contact you within 24 hours and will throw off to you all details, and will answer you on all your questions.


Thank you for attention Redd Cross of Slovenia!

Possibly this was done by a human being mechanically using a two-language dictionary, but the problem is the same.

Letter to Hillary Clinton

We sent this tonight, via the form on her campaign's Web site. I sort of think it would have been improved if I'd had a Harrumph! or two in there.


Senator Clinton:

We are two lifelong Democrats, both in our sixties, white, and middleclass. We were staunch supporters of your husband throughout his presidency. When talk first began about you possibly running for president some day, we assumed we would support you, as well.

In 2004, we supported John Edwards, and we supported him this time until he suspended his campaign. By that point, we had begun to prefer Barack Obama as our second choice, but we both still felt that we would be happy to give you our money and our votes if you were to win the nomination. We no longer feel that way.

What has made the difference? Not policies but the tenor of your campaign. We have become disgusted with its nastiness and your whining and the vile and undisguised racism of some of your campaign functionaries. We're not alone in this reaction. Friends of ours who are also staunch Democrats have told us that they will never vote for you and that if you win the nomination, they'll either not vote at all or will vote for a third-party candidate.

Since we live in Colorado, which you have apparently written off as an unimportant "boutique state," perhaps this doesn't matter to you. If you're also a staunch Democrat, it should. If Senator Obama is the candidate, our party has a good chance of carrying this state and others in the Rocky Mountain West. As president, he would represent all races and regions of the country. Apparently, you don't aspire to do that.

Tonight, we will be donating money to the Obama campaign. We intend to donate more to his campaign in the future.


David and Leonore Dvorkin
Denver, Colorado

Overblownment: Movie Review

Overblownment, a movie starring Keira Slightly, a bunch of other folks, and with a special appearance at the end by Vanessa Redgrave playing ancient, losing-her-brain Briony.

This is a painfully bad chick flick with sophomoric artistic pretensions. Mysteriously, it won oodles of awards and respectful reviews - I suspect by reviewers who were afraid to admit that this emperor has no clothes or, even worse, couldn't tell. The flick is fraught, I tell you, fraught. With what? With great ghastly gobs of fraughtness. It's silly and empty and shallow and hollow and uses time jumps and camera trickery and serious stares by the actors to try to bully us into thinking that it's deep and meaningful and significant.

The story starts in 1935, in a country house filled with characters who act and speak and have names like Hollywood parodies of English country-house characters. Thirteen-year-old aspiring writer Briony Tallis, for reasons that make absolutely no sense, falsely accuses stout young Robbie Turner, son of the groundskeeper, of rape, thus breaking the heart of Briony's breastless older sister, Cecilia, who loves Robbie and is loved by him in turn. Sob! Oh, and also allowing the real rapist -- whose identity is obvious to everyone in the audience but not to any of the pretty dimwits on the screen -- to escape with a sleazy smirky smile. Hint: He's the only young male character present who has a moustache. He's also the most convincing actor.

Robbie is taken away to jail, and is saved a few years later by the fortunate invasion of Poland by Germany, when he's given the choice of staying in jail or joining the Army. Since the war will be over in no time and the boys will be home by Christmas, the Army is obviously the better choice.

Oops! Robbie ends up with a few hundred thousand other desperate men on the beach at Dunkirk, is evacuated home to England, gets back together with Cecilia, and, except for occasional bouts of murderous rage because of PTSD, spends the rest of his life happily with her, gamboling in the surf in sight of the frightfully famous white cliffs of Dover. And yes, there is a moment where voices sing "There'll be blue birds over etc." How fucking manipulative can you get?

But, wait! He didn't make it home! He died of septicemia during the night before he would have been evacuated! And Cecilia died when a German bomb hit a water main and the underground station in which she was sheltering from the blitz was flooded! All of the other stuff was just an invention in a novel titled Atonement, written by the ancient, losing-her-brain Briony! Which we learn when we jump suddenly to the present and see Briony being interviewed for a TV show and explaining everything to us! Oh, God, that's soooooo artistic! You can weep and feel waves of vicarious romance and think you're experiencing an elevated moment of awful artistic artistry, all at the same time!

Here's what would have improved this movie: If only the script had been written by a reincarnation of P. G. Wodehouse! Then it would have been a delightful tale of comic confusion, with witty dialog and amusing coincidences and cleverly silly characters. And the guy and the girl would have gotten each other at the end for real.

Alternatively, during the war scenes, they could have shown us stuff getting blowed up real good. Including the script.

This movie sucks. It sucks with a suckitude so mighty that it puts black holes to shame. Rating: Minus 52 stars.

Unidentifiable Doohickeys

Like most people, we have a drawer in our kitchen that holds things, stuff, doohickeys. This evening, Leonore held one of those up and asked me if I knew what it was. It looked vaguely familiar but that was the best I could do, so I agreed that we should throw it away.

Leonore: "Good. We don't need any more unidentifiable doohickeys."

Me: "So exactly how many unidentifiable doohickeys do we need?"

Now I'm wondering if anyone has studied this question. Is there an algorithm one can use to determine exactly how many unidentifiable doohickeys one needs?

Sent Partial Off

To the agent who wants an exclusive.

After the long wait and no response to my prompting e-mail, I just didn't feel I could keep waiting for the agent who had a partial already.

We move on! To ... somewhere.

Fudge and Retirement

Fudge recipe.

I just made a batch and absentmindedly skipped the whipping step. Now it's not hardening, which may answer the question I've always had: Why is the whipping step necessary? This is great fudge, by the way. If you don't skip any of the steps.

And retirement. Still a long way away.

David's Definitions for April 2008

Restive

(Will appear in the April 2008 issue of Community News)

A restive person is resistant to being controlled. It can also mean that the person is impatient or unhappy when an attempt is made to control or restrict him. The word comes from the French word rester - which used to have the meaning to resist. Restive is a nifty word, but it's easy to confuse with restless, which has nothing to do with being controlled and comes from an entirely different root - the old Germanic word rasta. One could lead to the other, though. For example, parents whose restive child refuses to go to bed will end up restless. Both will probably get whiney, which comes from another Old English word.



I'm collecting all of these at: http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Dangling and Squirming

Ew, that's an awful image! But, anyway.

I think it's now been about a month and three quarters since I sent the requested partial to the agent. According to the advice given here by the always amusing Nathan Bransford, the proper prodding period is one month.

The agent I want to prod would be a great match for what I write, so I don't want to be too proddy and annoy anyone. (And there's also that damned Britishish upbringing nattering in my ear about not annoying people.) What complicates things is that he's part of an agency that says in numerous places on its Web site that they don't want e-mail queries. I did the query and partial via snail mail, but what about a prod? Wouldn't e-mail be okay for that? Or would an e-mail be, just, you know, rather too too? (I never knew anyone who actually spoke that way, but the voice in my head does sometimes.) (I mean, it's a metaphorical voice! I don't really hear voices!) (Stop saying that!)

I feel like one of those divorced middleaged people who's trying to get back into the dating game, and all the rules have changed.

Explanation of Benefits

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

I just got two of these from the so-called medical insurance company regarding dental work Leonore and I had done. As is always the case, the forms are in fact a list of how much isn't covered and how much we have to pay ourselves (oodles).

They ought to at least be honest and call the form Itemization of Exclusions.

Dangling Man Syndrome

That's what Leonore calls it when I get like this. She's referring to the Bellow novel, which I've never read and don't intend to, but the title is useful.

As I mentioned here before, an agent requested a partial of Time and the Soldier. I sent it and have been waiting with zero patience for the response. Another agent has the whole book (he wanted it as part of the original query) and recently asked for a full bibliography and sales figures. A third asked for a partial, but on an exclusive basis, so I can't send him anything pending the response from the first agent (which of course I hope will be a request for the full ms.).

So now I'm dangling. And unable to do anything productive at all.

Bush deserves prison in this life and the lake of fire in the next

Prison in this life for what he's done to America and the eternal lake of fire* in the next for what he's done to Iraq.

In reality, though, come January 20, 2009 he'll smirk his way out of the White House and into a plush life in Dallas. I hope the next president will be a Democrat, and I assume that Democrat will be either Obama or Clinton, but what are the chances that the next president will order a full, aggressive investigation of the Bush Administration's evildoing? What are the chances that Dubya will ever suffer anything for what he's done?

Zero.

Fucking depressing.






* I'm an atheist, but I fully understand the appeal of that idea.

I first voted in 1964

LBJ vs. Goldwater.

I was a college student of the 1960s variety. I hated (and very rationally feared) the Vietnam war and the draft, but I voted for LBJ because I was sure Goldwater would be worse. I'm still sure I did the right thing.

So I've voted in a lot of national and local elections by now, and in the vast majority of them, my preferred candidate wasn't on the ballot. But I chose the least of the evils, or the best of those available, as the case may have been. I don't regret any of my votes.

My fellow liberals often rejected that position and either didn't vote at all or voted for a third-party candidate. In 1968, that gave us the vile Nixon. In 1980, that helped give us the viler Reagan. In 2000, that contributed to giving us the vilest of all, Bush.

I'm more convinced than ever that I did the right thing in the past, when I voted for the best, or least objectionable, Democrat. I'll continue to do that.

Stupid Stubble

Since I ranted, a few months ago, against women wearing high heels, it's only fair that also rant against something men have been doing that's no less absurd: not shaving.

I don't mean growing beards. I mean growing stubble. The unshaven look.

To be fair, I almost never see that on actual, human, three-dimensional men but rather on the strange versions of men depicted in certain TV shows. Oh, and also on some actors when they're not acting, to the extent that they're ever not acting.

The first time that look showed up, to my memory, was on the Sonny Crockett character in the TV show Miami Vice, a show I remember as being often great and often laughable, frequently in the same episode. For a while, there was even an electric shaver for sale that would give you the same unshaven look at Sonny Crockett. It was called the Miami Device. That name is almost as clever as the idea of selling men an expensive electric shaver designed to not shave them.

That silly look was okay for the Crockett character, though. He was a recovering alcoholic vice cop who was always on the edge of a breakdown of some sort, and the street-bum whiskers helped get that message across.

But why in the world are we seeing that absurd look on modern TV characters who are supposed to be ordinary middle-class folks? "Middle class" in the movie sense, that is. I.e., they live in huge houses and drive expensive cars and never worry about the monthly bills. Despite that, they apparently can't afford a good razor.

Of course styles change constantly, and most of the time they're weird, especially in the eyes of older people. That's the only constant. So my objection to the stupid stubble look is on a par with the objection of one generation to beards and of another generation to clean-shaven faces. ("They look like chamber pots," someone said of the latter, a couple of hundred years ago.) I can't even make a safety argument against the stupid stubble, the way one can against high heels. Or a noise argument. Or a damage-to-floors-and-legs-and-feet-and-hips-and-lower-back argument.

But it looks so God damned stupid!