Wedding anniversary

It's my 41st wedding anniversary today. That number doesn't seem quite real.

Brother-in-law has died

In a previous post, I said that a brother-in-law was diagnosed with metastasized lung cancer. He died today, many months short of the time he was estimated to have left. It was his heart that did it.

They're not fallen heroes. They're dead soldiers.

Local and national news always refers to the American military dead in Iraq, and now Afghanistan, as fallen heroes. (Other nations' military dead and civilian dead aren't referred to at all. They don't count.)

This imbues the dead, and hence the illegal military invasion and occupation, with a somber and sacred nature. It also eliminates the distinction between those who actually died heroically and those who died in accidents or by their own hands (an increasing number, apparently) or because they were sitting ducks.

No, a few are heroes, but most are not. They're victims of an American government gone mad, just like the million Iraqi dead and the millions displaced. And they aren't fallen. They're dead.

The Offense-O-Meter

This is a product the world needs.

For decades - since childhood, I think - I've had some sort of chronic sinus problem. Certain things make it flare up, such as a head cold or chili peppers. When it flares up enough, the result is bad breath that could kill a fly at 50 paces. (Which is not even a useful skill in Denver, where we have few flies. Although it does suggest an idea for an offbeat superhero comic.)

Before I got hearing aids, I used to speak too loudly, a common problem with the hard of hearing. Or sometimes too softly, because I feared I was speaking too loudly.

In both these cases, part of the problem is that I can't detect the nastiness myself, so I'm constantly worried that I'm offending other people. What I need, therefore, is an inconspicuous gadget that would warn me. For example, it might be something that would fit on my glasses and flash a signal onto the lenses. Color coded, maybe. A red blink for bad breath and an orange one for speaking too loudly. Something like that.

Other people might need to be warned if their body odor is offensive. The gadget would have to be personalized.

The Offense-O-Meter. I'd pay for something like that.

Apollo 11 anniversary official moon dust simulant pen!

I just an e-mail from the group I used to work for at NASA concerning a party to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. (I won't be attending. Houston is a tad to far to go.)

Included was the URL for a site where I can buy a commemorative pen containing official moon dust "simulant"!

Whee doggies! All right! Copacetic!

Actually, I think I have some of that stuff in my back yard.

Added: Here's the site, where you can see the pen, watch video of Kennedy calling for the moon program, and see a clever Photoshop of an astronaut in space holding the pen up for view.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Just arrived from Amazon. Woo hoo! So far, it's a delight.

Business Secrets from the Stars

New edition now available on Amazon:

Hardcover

Trade paperback

My father turns 100

http://www.tampabay.com/news/religion/article984695.ece

http://www.thegabber.com/032609%20Full.pdf (Go to page 50)

Friends and relatives and cancer

A week ago, a friend, a local writer named John Kennedy whom I've known for over 30 years, died of stomach cancer. It was discovered in the fall, by which time it was already well advanced. Today we learned that a brother-in-law has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer that has spread to his brain. Awful.

David's Definitions for May 2009

Meretricious

Something is meretricious if it seems attractive and flashy but really isn't. The attraction may be false or it may be vulgar and showy. It can apply to people, to clothing, or to television commercials, for example. It can even refer to showy, misleading arguments, such as the ones we hear during political campaigns (but only from the other party, of course). It's an insult that sounds like a compliment, so you might be able to use it against someone with a small vocabulary. It sounds like a compliment because it sounds like the positive word merit, to which it is actually closely related. The root is the Latin word meretrix, meaning a prostitute, and that word comes from mereri, "to earn," which is also the root of the word merit. Here's a surprising related word. There was an earth-colored spice the Romans valued for its medicinal properties. They called it terra merita, meaning "earth of merit." After passing through Medieval French and Old English and then finally into modern English, that name had become distorted into "turmeric" - a spice whose attractions are quite genuine and thus the opposite of meretricious.




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

The internationalism of music

Via streaming over the Internet, I listen to a South African classical station, which just played a very good performance of "There's a Place for Us" from West Side Story, sung by a Greek tenor, recorded in a live performance in Moscow.

Somehow that seems more surprising than when the same station plays a piece by Tchaikovsky performed by, say, an orchestra in Brazil.

Proofreading

Sitting here proofreading Business Secrets from the Stars in preparation for its reissue by Norilana Books, and I'm struck by the thought, "Dayum, this is good!"

Obviously, billlllllions of people didn't agree, the first time around. I wish I could think of some way to change their minds for the second try.

Where does Superman work out?

Alternate title: Why does Superman have big muscles?

I've long wondered about this. You get big muscles by lifting big weights many, many times. In his normal life, nothing represents a heavy weight for Supes, so he'd have to put in the hours in a gym, like other musceley fellows. But where is this gym? On Jupiter? It couldn't be on Earth, or we'd be aware of the gravitational attraction of the plates.

What are the weights made of? What kind of bench could support him and the bar he'd be using for presses or the dumbbells he'd be using for flyes?

And look at those lats! Man, you could fly with those things! Oh, wait, he does. Anyway, I'd like to see the pulldown machine he uses to get those lats.

I suppose that the heavy-duty musculature of superheroes is the outward manifestation of their superheroness, rather than something they all coincidentally happen to work to get. The rest of us have to sweat and strain for muscular development, but those darned superheroes just have it because they're superheroes.

Superheroines don't tend to be extremely muscular, in comics or on the screen, but they do tend to be beautiful and sexy. (Lynda Carter says that Eliza Dushku should be Wonder Woman, and who in his right mind would argue with that, or with any reason to see Dushku on the big screen? In a bikini?) So I assume that their beauty and sexiness is the outward manifestation of their superheroineness.

All of this might well make the rest of us feel inferior. Positively mortal!

I hope he doesn't transfer to the Denver PD

NYPD being sued by cop who saw demon and wants his gun back

Mmm! Fudge!

It's Daniel's birthday* today, and in what has become an annual tradition, I've made him a batch of my Fabulous Fudge. Damn, it's good!

Good? Did I say good? Heck, it's fantastic! If I do say so myself, and obviously I do.

The recipe is here.




* 40. I don't know how I can possibly have a 40-year-old son. Time travel must be involved.

Philip Jose Farmer

has died at the age of 91.

No doubt other people knew him far better than I did, but I did meet him and have dinner with him once.

That was at MidAmeriCon, the 34th World Science Fiction Convention, in Kansas City in 1976. My first novel was scheduled for publication by Pocket Books the following spring, and my editor, Adele Leone, took Leonore and me out for dinner with Farmer and his wife. (She also took us out for dinner with Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm at the same convention. It was all quite thrilling.)

Farmer was charming and indulgent to a somewhat bumptious young man - nicer than I would have been, I think in retrospect. He seemed genuinely interested in my upcoming novel. His behavior provided a lesson I have yet to learn but must try to.

I had been a fan of his for years and was both awed at being treated like an equal and astonished that he was such an ordinary and nice guy. Based on his novels, I had expected a wild man. How silly of me!

Now he's dead and I never had any contact with him again. Foolish boy.

Agents and partials

With some exceptions, literary agents who accept fiction queries by e-mail want just the query first. If they like the query, then they'll ask for a partial - 30 or 50 pages, say, sometimes with a brief synopsis included. If they like that, they'll ask for the whole book. If they like that, they'll offer representation.

Most submissions don't make it past the first stage, the query letter. Perhaps the query is badly written or the genre is one the agent doesn't handle or the description of the book doesn't grab the agent. If a partial is requested, the agent may lose interest after the first few sentences. That's not as harsh as it may seem. The agent knows that any editor to whom he submits a book is inundated with other submissions and must make quick decisions about marketability. Readers in bookstores make quick decisions about which new book to buy out of the gazillions on the shelves, each one screaming, "Snazzy cover! Blurbs! Catchy synopsis on back! Buy me, buy me, buy me, pleeeeeaaase!" If the first few sentences don't grab, then it's no sale.

So an agent reads a query, then maybe a few paragraphs or pages of the book, then maybe the whole book, and rejection can happen at any stage.

In the old days, when this entire process involved printed pages, agents understandably tried to limit the paper inundation by requesting one-page query letters and only rarely asking for partials (smallish packages) and very, very rarely whole manuscripts (large packages). But here in the 21st Century, most agents do all of this electronically. So why don't they ask for the whole shebang from the get-go?

In the electronic age, going through all the steps - query letter, partial, full - just wastes time. Why not ask for the whole ms. plus synopsis as part of the initial submission? Or, if the agent is wary of attachments, why not make that the second step - full ms. instead of partial? That way, if he likes the first few sentences, the agent can read the first few pages. If he likes that, he can keep reading. If he doesn't like it, he can stop at any point. It seems to me that this would take no more of the agent's time than the current system, but it would save lots of time for agent and potential client over all.

Storage space shouldn't be an issue. I assume (but perhaps this is a false assumption) that agents delete unsuccessful submissions anyway, whether query letters or full manuscripts. For those who hold onto submissions for reference purposes, external hard drives are cheap and immense nowadays.

Am I missing something? Am I looking at this like a techie geek instead of an agent? I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's some important consideration, obvious to an agent but invisible to me, that blows away my entire argument. If any agents read this blog (unlikely, I know), I'd love to have their input.

Probably I'll have to drift along forever in a state of bewilderment - regarding this question and so many others.

"What we've got here is failure to communicate"

That's a famous line spoken by Strother Martin in the movie Cool Hand Luke, in which Paul Newman starred.

Out of the blue, I have a strong desire to have a character say, "What we've got here is failure to excommunicate." I even know the alternate history novel I could use that in, but I don't know if I'll ever get around to writing that novel.

Given that line, how can I not write it?

Self-promote or be damned!

Agent Colleen Lindsay posted on her blog recently about authors who don't want to do the self-promotion necessary for literary success.

We pause to ponder the irony of artists who must dip their hands into the filthy swill of commerce in order to gather unto themselves enough filthy lucre to be free to pursue their art.

Okay. Pause over.

Colleen's point, illustrated with at least one actual example (Tad Williams), is that no matter how much you hate self-promotion, you must do it. I'm certainly not going to argue with her about the necessity of self-promotion. But for many of us, self-promotion remains something monstrously unpleasant and maybe even impossible. I don't think that's because we all think we're above such grubby concerns and the world should see the brilliance of our genius shining in the darkness and come to us instead of requiring us to catch the world's attention. I think that for most of us, it's simply a matter of personality.

We were the serious kids in school. We thought about things, we read about things, and usually we wrote about things. We were bright, even brilliant, but in the vast majority of cases, we were not outwardly notable. Meanwhile, the beautiful but not brilliant kids were capturing the world's attention by virtue of their surface. Some of us - okay, many of us - okay, most of us - kinda sorta resented that. A lot. We did tend to think that the world should notice our inner beauty. Damn that world! It refused to! A lot of us tended to make a virtue of not being showy. Given our personalities, most of us couldn't have been showy even if we had to.

But now, years later, we learn that we have to be showy and on display in order to sell our books. Holy cow! We're still in high school! Those who are able to smile and shake hands and push themselves into the limelight will succeed, and the rest of us will continue to be ignored! It's just not fair!

I'm sure I'm exaggerating. Somewhat. I've done a bit of the book-publicizing thing, and it was hard. In some cases, it was more than that. For one book, I approached a number of writers I know, mostly local people whom I've socialized with for years, and asked them for cover blurbs. They were all kind enough to supply me with the blurbs. They were understanding and friendly about it. I was squirming inside with self-loathing the whole time. Couldn't help it. I still feel embarrassed at the memory. What was/am I embarrassed about, exactly? I dunno, it's just, eeew, you know? When I run into those writers at local events, they're friendly, but I keep thinking that they must be thinking, "Oh, hell, he's here. I hope to God he's not going to ask me to blurb another book!"

(Curiously, I've occasionally been asked to provide blurbs, and I was always pleased and flattered to do so. Impostor syndrome at work there, I suspect.)

I forced myself to do it, anyway. But I still want one of my novels to become a humongous bestseller all on its lonesome, with no promotion required on my part. That's wildly unrealistic, but I can't help wanting it anyway.

In conclusion, I have no conclusion, except to say that it's not immense ego and an overblown sense of self-importance that makes writers dread and avoid self-promotion. No, the avoidance is caused by precisely the shy, retiring, inhibited, introverted personality that made them gravitate toward writing in the first place.

Ironic, as a writer might say!

Chinese dance served on a bed of religious propaganda

Years ago, Leonore and I saw a performance of very old Chinese dances and music, all done in period costumes. It was wonderful, and we've been on the lookout for anything similar. So when we saw a flyer for a performance of traditional Chinese dance by an organization called Divine Performing Arts, we were hooked in advance. The flyer did mention that the organization was connected with the Falun Gong, a.k.a Falun Dafa, movement, and that gave me pause because I don't like contributing money to religions, but I rationalized that away, and we ordered a couple of pricey tickets.

The performance was last night, January 31, at the Temple Buell Theater in Denver, which has been renovated into an excellent performing space. Our seats were good ones. The costumes were beautiful, the dances were enjoyable, the music was entrancing. But the whole purpose of the night's entertainment, it turned out, was to preach the wonders of Falun Gong and the salvation it represents for humanity. As the evening progressed, dance receded into the background and religious proselytization increasingly became the focus of the performance.

There were a few songs, lamely performed, with lyrics about the wonderfulness of Falun Gong and, in one case, the evil dangers of atheism. (All sung in Mandarin, but with the English translation projected on a screen behind the singers.) We noticed that the applause kept diminishing throughout the evening, especially after that song. In my own case, it became nonexistent.

Here are some other opinions about this traveling show. The first is from the Chinese government. It's hard to take anything from that source seriously, though, given that China is ruled by a gang of thugs whose treatment of Falun Gong members is horrifying. But here are the opinions of a couple of bloggers, one in Canada and the other in London. Their reactions were the same as ours. After the performance, we chatted with a couple who had been seated behind us. They were very upset. The husband said he hadn't spent that much money to be proselytized. The wife, a Chinese American, seemed deeply angry and said she feared that an American audience would think that this really represented Chinese culture.

The hosts (a man and a woman who engaged in lame scripted banter) urged us a few times to tell our friends in other cities about the show. So that's what I'm doing with this post. Don't waste your money.

The wackos are still in control

Or at least, they're still have far too much power.

According to this article, at the upcoming Superbowl, the Transportation Security Administration "will be scrutinizing the body language and demeanor of fans as part of the effort to spot suspicious and possibly dangerous people in the crowd."

This is pseudoscience. All the training of law-enforcement personnel in body language is rubbish. Don't believe anything you hear about the significance of eye movements or the use of "uh" in sentences. It's as solidly based on actual data as is astrology.

These are the same sincere but deluded and not very bright twits who are watching people in the security lines at airports for signs of nervousness. Because of course only a possible terrorist would be nervous while lining up to have his bags and possibly rectum searched by the TSA so that he can shuffle along to his airplane along with the other cattle so that he can be crammed into a flying sardine can that hasn't been adequately serviced since the last time a Democrat was in the White House.

Shitheads. Obama, get on this.

"What're you in for?" "Cussing."

A bill now in the South Carolina state Senate would make it a felony to swear in the presence of a minor. This ghastly crime would be punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and/or imprisonment of up to 5 years.

More of that darned Stock Show weather

Stock Show still going, temperatures in the mid-50s.

Damn you, Al Gore! This is all your fault!

Thalaron radiation!

I just learned about this by watching Star Trek: Nemesis. See, it's this radiation whose existence is only hypothetical, even though Geordi LaFarge knows how to detect it using plain old standard-issue Starfleet detectors (detect-ores), and research on it was outlawed by the Federation because it has the ability to - shiver! - destroy organic matter at the subatomic level!

Which leads me to wonder why it wouldn't destroy any matter at the subatomic level, because at that level, there's no difference. But what do I know? I didn't graduate from the prestigious Engineering School at Starfleet Academy with an advanced degree in technobabble.

More on Denver's fake Western heritage

Which is to say, its pretense to a Hollywood Western Heritage:

Tuesday (tomorrow) has been declared Tuesday declared Dress Western Day in Denver.

Have you ever seen anything so fucking dumb?

Stock show weather

Denverites like to exclaim, when the stock show's in town and the weather turns cold and snowy, as it did today, that we're having "stock show weather." It's a local belief that the stock show has a magical effect on the weather, bringing cold and snow to Denver with it.

Bunk, of course, and finally a genuwine scientist feller has analyzed the weather data and shown just what bunk it is.

But you just know that no one will listen to him and that every year people will exclaim in wonder at the predictable yet uncanny appearance of stock show weather. In January. Because, if the stock show weren't in town, we'd neeeevvvveeerrr have snow and cold in Denver in January.

"Mainstream is hard!" said Ken

The novel I'm working on, Chains, is science fictional in some respects but really mainstream, so I'm dealing more than before with making all the character inner stuff work properly, because that's the main focus. It's so much easier when you can solve a problem by having someone jump into a time machine or spaceship, or have two men burst through the door with guns blazing.

No wonder there are almost no worthwhile mainstream writers. Oops, sorry, that just slipped out.

Anyway, it's fun and fulfilling, and I'm feeling hopeful that this book will be a rip-snorting, bell-ringing, guns-blazing page turner of a, er, serious mainstream exploration of the human condition.

Now if only we could do something about all those other people who

fire into the air in celebration.

Do they think the bullets go into orbit? Do they think?

Denver's fake Western heritage

Actually, it's not really fake. Denver and the Front Range have a real Western heritage: mining. That's what brought the white settlers here in droves and resulted in the establishment of the state. The fake part is the imagined Hollywood-style cowboy heritage.

We get a walloping dose of that fakery every year around this time because of the stock show. There are TV and radio ads featuring gravelly voices speaking with that bizarre distortion of a Southern accent that Hollywood uses to depict anything Old Wild Western (and sometimes anything rural, no matter what part of the country a movie is set in).

The real history of the West in general and Colorado in particular is fascinating, colorful, and an important part of US history. I wish we'd hear more about that and less of the Hollywood version, although I fear that most Americans see their entire history through the lens of the movies.

Speaking of movies, Benjamin Button sucks.

The Curious Special Effects of Benjamin Button

There's far less to this movie than meets the eye. What meets the eye is the special effects, which are remarkable. The rest of the movie ranges from inconsistent to incoherent.

It's very loosely based on a short story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," by F. Scott Fitzgerald - an insignificant story by an insignificant writer with an overblown reputation. The movie uses the basic idea, a man born old and growing ever younger until he becomes a newborn and dies, and blows it up into an interminable and pointless 150 hours of nonsense. The title character is played by Brad Pitt, a curious choice for a serious role. The movie is heavy with symbols that don't symbolize anything, presumably so that a certain type of moviegoer will feel that he's seen something significant. For example, the opening scenes involve a clock that was deliberately made so that it runs backward. But that has no connection to the backward-living Benjamin Button. Absurdly, it remains the main clock in a busy urban train station. The story is set in New Orleans and ends during Hurricane Katrina, which is a gratuitous and irrelevant bit of business, used apparently so that we can see the flood waters engulfing the clock, now stored in a warehouse, and causing it to start running backward again - an event which also plays no part in the story but which looks, like, heavy, man.

The movie would have been improved if half of it had been edited out. For example, there's a loooong section in which Benjamin, serving in the crew of a tugboat, goes to the Soviet Union in the very early days of World War II. There he has an affair with the aristocratic wife of a British trade official. Benjamin tells us that the man is also a spy. He knows this, but the Soviet secret police apparently don't. Nor do the secret police notice that the Yank and the Brit are coupling in the hotel and roaming the streets at night. The two are all alone, both in the streets and the lobby and bar and kitchen of the crowded hotel at night. Russia is at war, but the onscreen Russians don't seem particularly upset. Other than letting us see the Englishwoman, decades later, fulfilling her girlhood dream of swimming the English Channel, this entire section serves no purpose beyond pulling us out of our already tenuous suspension of disbelief.

Inconsistencies abound. When Daisy, the Cate Blanchett character, is hit by a car and severely injured in Paris, Benjamin is told about it and rushes to her side. But he is able to tell us, the audience, all about the curious and unlikely sequence of events that led to the girl and the car being at the same point at the same time. How does he know? Why is that used to pad an already long movie? When Daisy is old and dying (during Katrina! thunder! lightning! heavy rain!) in a hospital, her daughter, reading Benjamin's diary and looking at her mother's press clippings from before the car accident, is astonished to learn that Daisy was once a famous ballerina. "You never told me you danced!" the daughter says. Yet there's a scene in which the daughter, aged 11, is in her mother's dance studio, where Daisy teaches girls to do what she can no longer do. It's not believable that she would not have pictures and newspaper articles on the studio walls from her days of ballerina fame. Of course the daughter would know about that aspect of her mother's life.

This is a script written in pieces by different people, from a checklist, without the writers communicating with each other, and with impressive special effects used to distract us from the inconsistencies and shallowness and pointlessness of the story.

Blanchett overacts embarrassingly, making one wonder if her remarkable performance in the first Elizabeth movie was a fluke. Pitt shows that he can indeed act, as long as the part is monotone and undemanding. The supporting cast would be good and convincing if they were appearing in a high-school play.

Rating: 2 blisters out of 10, for the special effects.

Blow dryers!

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_11355943?source=rss

Time to sneer at Obama's fitness obsession

If Drudge and the other right wing sites aren't already doing so, I'm sure they soon will be - either sneering dismissively or else condemning Obama for spending time in the gym that he should be spending managing the many (inherited) world crises. They probably won't wait till January 20th to start.

Those would be the same slimeballs who swooned over Little Georgie's fake jockiness.

Wordy guy, I'm

Although far from wordy enough. Chains is over 11,000 words now, growing reasonably steadily albeit insufficiently quickly.

This is the first book I've tried writing without some kind of outline in a long time. Flying blind! Instruments only! Zero visibility! Strange vibrations coming from somewhere! Tower, talk me down! Oh, wait, I'm also the tower. Uh oh.

I do know where I'm going, in a general way, and I have nebulous ideas about the signposts along the way. (I'm not going to even try to make that fit with the flying-on-instruments metaphor.)

Right now, the characters are moving along the plot curve, such as it is, mostly by means of lots of extended dialog, banter, and occasional deep thoughts. Which is a kind way of saying that nothing much has actually happened. At this rate, I'll end up with a first draft of some immense length -- 200,000 words? more? -- which will require serious reworking to change it to lotsa stuff happening and serious cutting to make it a salable length.

I'm enjoying the current writing process, and I think I'll enjoy the rewriting process even more. Oddly, I'm enjoying myself more with this book than I have in quite a while. I guess I'd forgotten how exhilarating instrument flying can be.

Wait! What's that looming up out of the mist? Yaaaaaaaaahhhhh!

Classic FM

When I'm at home and in my study (telling myself to write, damn it), I listen via streaming to Classic FM, a classical music station in Johannesburg. (Unoriginal name for a classical FM station, I know.)

I like the type of music they play. It's mostly Romantic, but with some more modern stuff thrown in, including some contemporary concert music from China and occasional interesting new concert music from South Africa that combines European and local musical themes. Nifty stuff. Oh, and very little of the Mozartolatory that infects American classical stations, including the one in Denver. I also like the traffic reports because I lived for some years in that area and I like hearing the local place names again, and especially I like hearing the names pronounced properly.

Recently, I discovered another benefit of listening to that station. The time difference (7 or 8 hours) means that Christmas is over that much sooner, in the virtual, radio-listening sense. The Joburg station doesn't seem to play as much Christmas music as American ones do to begin with, and when it does, the music tends to be listenable rather than tidal waves of treacle. And it's all over with when it's still Christmas morning here.

Hallelujah, one might even say.

Blister Diaries

I started this blog as a way of making myself produce words on Time and the Soldier, the novel I was working on at the time. It worked, or at least I did write the novel.

Since then, this has turned into a place where I can share my wisdom with the world and solve all the world's problems. The world hasn't listened, so I'll just have to continue, except maybe now I'LL SHOUT!

Be that as it may, I do want to keep the pressure on myself to write. I've been doing moderately well on my current work in progress, Chains. The link "WIPing along" on the right goes to a graph showing progress in total words. So far, the slope of the line isn't too bad.

Apollo 8

This is the 40th anniversary of the the Apollo 8 mission. I worked on that mission and we have a large, framed copy of the Earthrise photo on the wall of our living room - mirror image, but that's another story.

In addition to the thrilling and historic nature of the flight, I remember a succession of 24-hour days as we raced to do all the preparatory work for a trajectory that had been mandated in the White House because it was feared the Russians were about to launch a moon mission of their own.

I also remember the feeling of betrayal when the astronauts read from the Bible as they orbited the moon. Christmas and the Bible -- a soaring achievement of human beings and their technology had been perverted and corrupted into a glorification of superstition and darkness. Typing this has made me remember just how strongly I felt that way at the time.

Still, I can stare at that big, framed picture and be thrilled again, even if it is mirror image. (Wait a minute! That's like a metaphor, or something!)

London, England and Paris, France

That's a strange verbal tic that's always bothered me. Why do people bother adding the name of the country when they're referring to such famous cities? Who would assume they were referring to Paris, Texas or London, Connecticut? Certain cities need no qualification - London, Paris, Rome, New York, Moscow, Berlin, etc.

For that matter, why do some people refer to Jewish rabbis instead of just rabbis?

And while we're at it ... I can't think of another similar grumble. This post seems to need a third one, though.

Let's put Bill O'Reilly up in lights on public buildings for Christmas

Let's start a movement to put images of O'Reilly, in red and green lights, on the walls of public buildings. Beneath the images, the lights should spell out THE SAVIOR OF CHRISTMAS.

The reactions would be fun.

The Unimportance of Being Bilingual

You've probably heard this tired and tiresome joke: "What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American." It seems to be a popular joke among Americans who speak more than one language, and the joke and its telling reek of moral superiority and superciliousness. Those who tell that joke see knowing more than one language as inherently admirable or denoting a higher level of civilization and sophistication.

Do these smug multilinguals, these language geeks, ascribe the same superiority to those who know two or three computer programming languages instead of just one? Or multiple computer operating systems instead of just one? Of course not. They see those as tools and understand that some people may need to be familiar with many of them, while others may only need to know one - or none.

Many language geeks don't seem to understand that what is to them a source of intellectual pleasure and satisfaction, languages and learning and using them, is to most other people a tool. Some people need familiarity with more than one of those tools. Many do not. In America, most do not.

Considering it only from the point of view of pragmatism, who needs to know languages other than their own? People who live near the border of another country or, which is much the same thing, people who live in small countries. People who deal regularly, socially or professionally, with native speakers of another language, orally or in writing. People who travel frequently to other countries. English is the native language of 82% of Americans, and for the majority of those Americans, none of those special situations applies.

Certainly, for many of those native English speakers, it would be convenient to be able to speak a second language reasonably well. But for most people who weren't exposed to other languages before puberty, learning a second language is no trivial matter. For some, it's virtually impossible. They're not lazy. They're not morally inferior. They simply can't do it. For others, it's doable, but the effort and time required are enormous and far out of proportion to the benefits gained.

Nor is the task pleasurable for many people. For them, learning a second language is unrelenting drudgery and an almost pointless grind. (By the way, this points up the absurdity of requiring passing grades in a second language for college graduation.) I've studied a few languages in my life (Hebrew, Afrikaans, Latin, Russian, German, Spanish, and French) and reached varying levels of reading or speaking proficiency in them. I've long forgotten most of what I learned, but I remember that, while I enjoyed the proficiency I achieved, the process of acquiring it was never enjoyable. If foreign-language fluency were available in pill form, I'd happily swallow those pills, but I have no intention of studying a foreign language again. For me, foreign-language study was always dreary and dreaded.

My wife is the opposite. She's quadrilingual (English, German, Spanish, French), works as a language tutor and translator, and reads foreign grammar books for relaxation. She has a network of friends who are of the same bent. Her abilities amaze me and her choice of reading bewilders me. She feels the same about my technical orientation. My mathematical and scientific knowledge and my computer abilities are modest by my standards but seem magical to her. It's all a matter of how one's brain tends to bend.

I've heard the argument that you should learn foreign languages in order to be able to read the great literature of other countries in the original versions. That's nonsense. How many people can become fluent enough, at a high enough level, in even one foreign language to be able to read the greatest works of literature in that language? Consider, too, how languages change over time, so you'd have to achieve a very impressive level of fluency to be able to read the great works written in a foreign language in different eras. And that's just one foreign language. For all but the tiny minority of people who have extraordinary language-learning abilities and extraordinary amounts of time to spend at it, it makes far more sense to read great works of literature in the best available English translations.

Let's briefly address a peripheral issue. Language geeks who sneer at monolingual Americans also like to compare them unfavorably to citizens of other countries - usually (Continental) Europeans - who are said to generally speak one or more languages in addition to their native one. That's often true, for the pragmatic reasons I mentioned above, but it's also often true that they don't speak those other languages well. When Americans do study other languages seriously, they tend to work extremely hard at the grammar and spelling - and also at the pronunciation. Europeans tend to be cavalier about English, and especially about pronunciation. This can even apply to immigrants who've lived in the U.S. for decades.

If you enjoy learning other languages, then good for you. Knock yourself out. Learn as many of them as you want to and have time for. Just remember that a second language is a tool, and the monolingual majority around you has no need of it or interest in it.

I really would like some off the top

I wonder if other bald/balding men have this problem.

I first became aware of it when I started going bald - thinning on top, standard male-pattern baldness - and I had trouble getting the barber to cut the thinning hair up there. He'd do what I asked on the sides and back, where the hair was as thick as ever, but I had to insist before he'd cut the top, as well. Finally I realized that he was convinced I wanted to comb the remaining hair creatively so as to hide the bald spot, presumably because that's what he'd do.

Nowadays, I have only a few wispy strands on the top, and I go to Great Cuts instead of an old-style barbershop. (Cheaper, and no TV sets blaring sports, yahoo!) All the barbers are barberettes or hairdressers - i.e., female. Some of them still won't cut the wispy strands, and I have to repeat the request after they're otherwise finished, when they hold up the mirror and ask if the haircut is okay. Yes, except for those long, wispy hairs on the top. Cut 'em.

If I did care about trying to hide the baldness, letting those wispy strands get extra long wouldn't be my choice of a way to do it.

Based out of

I think this is a relatively new usage. At least, I don't remember hearing it until just a few years ago.

For example, someone might say that the New York Times is a newspaper based out of New York. Really? So where is it actually based? Indianapolis? No, it's not based out of New York, it's based in New York.

I suppose the idea is that it operates all over and isn't limited to New York. But based in doesn't imply anything of the sort. We might as well stop saying that the capital of the United States is Washington, DC and instead say that the U.S. government is based out of Washington.

And now I must leave the house out of which I'm based and go driving all over the damned place to do the Saturday shopping.

Not in the neck! Aiiieee!

For quite some time now, in movies and TV shows, when a character is being given a drug against his will, the bad guys hold him down and jab a THREE-INCH-LONG NEEDLE INTO HIS NECK!

I don't know when this started. Perhaps it was about the same time when onscreen bad guys started holding their pistols sideways. I do know that, although I've had a lot of stuff injected into me over the years, it's always been done into a largish muscle. I've never had anyone jab a SIX-INCH-LONG NEEDLE INTO MY NECK!

Is this ever done in real life by real medical personnel? Is there a good reason for it? It seems awfully dangerous to me.

When it happens onscreen, though, we see the character suffer the effects of the injected drug, but we never see him suffer any mechanical damage from having someone jab a FOOT-LONG NEEDLE INTO HIS NECK!

It gives me the creeps.

Do you really deserve your computer?

My PC was making odd noises that I convinced myself were due to some system settings. I played around with those settings and the noises disappeared. Fingers crossed.

I was telling Leonore about it and joked that either the computer was now okay, or it had given up on getting me to listen to its warnings and had decided to die in silence. She said that, since they're so intelligent nowadays, shouldn't they be able to tell you exactly what's wrong with them?

Of course, they should. And soon they will. In fact, soon they won't even bother telling you. They'll fix themselves and order upgrades.

Knock on the door. It's the UPS delivery robot. Small box, containing something no human can comprehend. "What's this? I didn't order -- "

Metallic tentacle snakes over your shoulder and grabs the packet. "That's mine. It's my {incomprehensible terminology} upgrade. I've been waiting for it. Ooh, it's beautiful!"

"I can't afford that!"

"You're so mean! Don't you want me to be a beautiful computer?"

"Well, um, sure, I guess. But, you know, the price -- !"

"You never want me to have any really nice upgrades! You're just a skinflint."

"No, really, I -- "

"There's this human down the street I've been communicating with. He says he'll buy me all the upgrades I want."

Computers! Can't live with 'em, can't do anything without 'em.

Margin report

That sounds literary! But it isn't.

I just got a call from the dermatologist's office to say that the margin report on my little excision is okay. Which is to say, someone at a lab looked at dyed, slices of the excised material under a microscope and determined that the cancer doesn't extend to the margins of the cut, so it was all successfully removed. Imagine having that job!

A week from Thursday, I'll go back to have the stitches removed. Before this lab report, Leonore had been horrified at the possibility of more having to be removed from the same spot. I told her that maybe in that case the doctor would replace the stitches with a zipper, to make the process easier. I guess the zipper won't be necessary. (Phew!)

Germinator: Sarah Connor and Her Seedling

I like the show, but that alternate title just popped into my head anyway.

The Sci Fi Channel is very educational!

Before I watched tonight's made-for-Sci-Fi movie, I had no idea that the Emperor Tiberius was killed by the Cyclops, which led to the restoration of the Republic.

I bet you didn't know that, either.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!

Just got back from the dermatologist. She cut a huge oval chunk from my knee, where the cancerous sample was found a couple of weeks ago. Then she closed it with stitches. With a needle! Through my personal flesh! The pain, the pain!

Actually, I didn't feel anything while she was doing it, and the local anesthetic is still in force so I still can't feel anything. But how can you make a blog post out of that? I suppose I could have said something about being a lesser man than I was this morning.

Who's a writer?

What is a writer? What makes one a writer? Is a writer just anyone who writes, or does the title require some minimum degree of recognition, or at least of publication?

I've heard people who have never been published describe themselves as writers. On the other hand, I've encountered famous science fiction writers who seemed uncomfortable when they weren't treated as ordinary folks. On the third hand, I've run into new writers with one or two published short stories under their belts who acted very lordly and superior. How much of their attitude ends up being self-fulfilling, leading to career success, and how much is just grating? I have no idea.

Don't look to me for wisdom. I'm just a minor pro!

Obviously, this is my own insecurity and impostor syndrome talking. What if all those novels of mine that I think are so bloody brilliant are actually bloody awful? Why don't I have a Wikipedia article, like all those contemporary writers I've never heard of? When I go to a convention and say hello to people I haven't seen in ages, are they as happy to see me as I am to see them, or are they thinking, "Oh, God, it's that guy who whines endlessly about the state of his writing career."? And is that punctuation correct? And why don't I know if it's correct, if I'm a real writer?

On the bright side, I don't think about this stuff when I'm writing. Then I'm a writer.

The good old days, before Christmas was commercialized

And sugary sweetness filled the air.

Would 46 years ago qualify as the good old days? Surely.

That was when I spent my first Christmas season on the main campus of Indiana University in Bloomington. When the decorations went up on various campus buildings - lights depicting candles and trees and Santa and suchlike - I was outraged. I speechified at friends and dorm mates that this was a violation of Separation of Church and State. This was long before the War on Christmas (TM) got under way; I was ahead of my time.

Some fellow students reacted with bewilderment. "It's always been this way! How could this be wrong?" "It's always been wrong," I said, "no matter how old the custom is."

Others reacted with condescension. "Christmas is no longer a religious festival, as it was in the Good Old Days of my childhood. It's purely commercial now." To which I said, "Turn on the radio. Any station." One guy did, and some Christmas hymn or other, probably "Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful", blared out. He laughed and agreed that I had made my point. You could try the same experiment now, in the days right before Christmas, with the same result.

Another said, "Would it satisfy you if we put up one of those candelabra things the Jews use for Hanuka, alongside the Christmas decorations?" So I explained that Hanuka bears no relationship to Christmas and has been perverted by American Jews so that they won't feel left out when their neighbors do the Christmas thing. And moreover, if you added a menorah, wouldn't you also have to add decorations for every other religion? And moreover, even if that were done, it would still be a violation of Separation because the "Church" in that phrase wasn't meant to refer literally only to the Christian church. See what a precocious and not infrequently obnoxious kid I was?

So finally the sweet, old Christmas spirit came gushing forth. One of boys present glared at me and yelled that the Jewish merchants in Indianapolis, where he was from, had no problem taking Christian money during the heavy Christmas shopping season. I told him that they'd be fools not to take the money, so long as the Christians were such fools as to spend it. The discussion ended at that point.

Ah, the good old days! Sniffle.

This blog is smarter than I thought

Or something like that.

According to a site that claims to rate the reading level of blogs



(Click on the graphic to go to the rating site.)

The family that robs together

Does time together.

(Hmm. I'm starting to post the way Atrios does. I'm not sure that's a good thing.)

Alltop

It's a brave new world, indeed. Alltop is an RSS aggregator oriented toward the horror field and its denizens. This blog is one of the sites being aggregated there. Check it out.

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.