Fascinating Word Facts

Did you know that:

The words "race car" spelled backwards still spell "race car"?

"Eat" is the only word that, if you take the first letter and move it to the last, spells its past tense, "ate."

And if you rearrange the letters in "Tea Party Republicans," and add just a few more letters, it spells: "Shut the fuck up, you free-loading, progress-blocking, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking, violent, hypocritical douche bags, and deal with the fact that you nearly wrecked the country under Bush and that our President is black, so get used to it."

Isn't that interesting?

David’s Definitions for September 2010

Senile

Nowadays, we use this word to mean old and infirm, weak from old age. This usage dates from the mid-19th century. Originally, the word just meant having to do with old age. It comes from a Latin word meaning old. Other words that derive from the same Latin root are senior, senescent (growing old, characteristic of being old), and the Spanish title señor. The medieval English word seneschal, a senior servant, comes from the same root combined with a Germanic word, skalk, for servant. I haven't been able to find out if skalk has any connection to our word skulk, which can mean to evade work. Presumably, one of the duties of the seneschal was to make sure that the lower-level servants didn't skulk.

(Will be published in the September 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

The Scrabble word score of senile is 6.
You can find that out here:
http://www.dvorkin.com/scrabscor.html

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

David’s Definitions for August 2010

Risible

Laughable, but in a negative sense. You wouldn't call a comedian's jokes risible if you liked them. If he was a painfully bad comedian, you could say that his attempt at comedy was risible. This is not a common word in modern English. It usually only shows up in pompously written book or movie reviews or political essays - the sort of thing written by people who can't see that their stuffy prose isn't admirable but is instead risible. The word appeared in English in the 1500s. Back then, it meant able to laugh, capable of laughing. By the 1700s, it had come to mean evoking laughter, laughable, but it didn't have a negative connotation yet. That's more modern. The root is the Latin word ridere, to laugh. Our word "deride" comes from the Latin combination de (down) combined with ridere. Someone who uses "risible" in ordinary speech is likely to encounter derision.

(Will be published in the August 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

But doctors urge caution blah blah alcohol blah blah

Last night, TV news carried yet another story about the benefits of alcohol. This one concerned the new Dutch report of a correlation between moderate alcohol consumption and reduced risk of several types of arthritis.

After the teaser for that news item, I said to Leonore, “I bet they’ll quote doctors warning people solemnly about the dangers of alcohol.” Of course I was right. Doctors caution against blah blah blah. Because of course if they didn’t give us those warnings, we’d all rush out and drink ourselves into the gutter and divorce and bank robbery and liver failure.

I’ve seen articles about the benefits of tea and coffee, and those lacked solemn warnings against taking up tea and coffee drinking. Yet historically tea and coffee houses have led to far more revolution than alcohol ever did. Possibly to more social unrest and planning of bank robberies, too, but I lack solid data regarding those.

Only when it concerns alcohol does the medical establishment – or maybe it’s the medical journalism establishment – feel the need to moralize, the conviction that without their stewardship we’d all go to Hell. Twits.

Great review of Dawn Crescent

The book was published a few years ago, but this review seems to have just shown up on the Joe Bob Briggs Web site.

I’ve just reissued the book as an e-book via Smashwords, so I hope this will do some good.

Forgive my indignation

Latest version of the Nigerian scam came in e-mail today:

Compliments of the season

Forgive my indignation if this message comes to you as a surprise and may offend your personality for contacting you without your prior consent and writing through this channel. When I was searching for a foreign reliable partner I assured of your capability and reliability to champion this business opportunity. I Request you to partner with me in order to finish a transaction worth 18,500.000.00 USD and transfer from here to your country. Your share would be 30% of the mentioned amount above. If you are interested, then reply me with your Full Names,Address,Age,Occupation,Phone,fax/nofor instructions :

Interview version of the school dream

I have a phone interview scheduled for this afternoon. Last night, I dreamed that I had decided to call it off. No idea why; it’s one of those things that make sense inside the dream.

Because Leonore and I were planning to go for a walk, and because the company was located near our house (in the dream, not in the real world), I said let’s just walk over there and I’ll cancel the interview and not bother calling or e-mailing to do it. We left the house with me wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and flip-flops with white socks. Yes, the socks made that uncomfortable. Leonore said, “Maybe you should wear business clothes, just in case someone there wants to talk to you.” I said, “Nah, I’ll just tell the receptionist.”

The actual company is small and headquartered here. The dream version was a minor branch of an international giant. Fancy waiting room full of suited people filling out application forms. I identified myself to the receptionist, who immediately pulled out a bunch of forms for me to fill in and said that as long as I was there, they’d just do the interview in person.

Cowed, I said nothing, went to a seat between two men in suits and ties, and started filling out the application form. Leonore was right, I thought. I should have worn business clothes.

It was really cold in there, too.

And then the dream ended. I bet I got an F in the course.

David’s Definitions for July 2010

Effect, Affect

A reader asked me to define these two words and explain how to use them. They're closely related words, very similarly spelled and pronounced, so it's easy to see why people get them confused. Affect is the verb, the action word. "The tragic story affected him deeply." Effect is the result. It's the noun, the thing. "The tragic story had a powerful effect on him." Perhaps it would help to think of the word effective. Something is effective if it has an effect. Unfortunately, and to make things more confusing, there are a couple of cases where the situation is reversed.  Effect does have one use as a verb: to bring something about, to cause something to happen. "The prisoner effected his escape by jumping from the police car." And affect has one use as a noun, meaning one's mental state. Fortunately, both of these uses are rare in ordinary English. Affect can also be used as a verb in the sense of "pretend": "He affected an air of cynicism." I think that use is rather old fashioned, though. I hope the effect of all of this is to leave you less confused, rather than more.

(Will be published in the July 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

Vile

I think vile is becoming one of my favorite words.

It so perfectly describes the moral foundation of certain movies – e.g., The English Patient, Like Water for Chocolate – and political movements like the Tea Bagger idiots and the contemporary Republican Party.

Then there are the Promise Keepers and the Dominionists. Vile.

The National Rifle Association. Vile.

Free Republic. Vile.

No doubt the list could be a lot longer.

And of course the word is an anagram for evil. Coincidence? Yeah, right.

Second Smashwords book

Business Secrets from the Stars, which is currently available in trade paperback and hardcover from Norilana Press, but not in e-book form. I’ve put it up on SW:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/14043

I’m really pleased with the cover I created. Click on the image for a big version.

Pit Planet Smashworded

I put one of my old novels on Smashwords as an e-book. This one didn’t take long to do. I guess I’m getting faster at this. Formatted the text, designed the cover, zippity zip. It’s here:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13760

Smashwords

I like saying that. Smashwords. Smashwords!

We just issued Leonore’s novel, Apart from You, in e-book format via Smashwords. (Smashwords!) The link is:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13715

Smashwords! Or did I already say that?

I’m going to start getting all of my old books out as e-books the same way. Namely, via Smashwords. (Smashwords!) I’m thinking of completing my vampire series as e-books. Two were published in mass-market paperback, eons ago, but I had plans for two more, which I’ll probably write, this time around. Similarly, my one real mystery novel was supposed to be first of three novels featuring the same (somewhat anti-)hero, so maybe I’ll do that complete series now.

Via (all together now) Smashwords!

(Smashwords!)

Gloob died today

It was an incalculable loss to mankind. He was the last of his people, the Gleb, and the last speaker of their language, Glebbish. Gloob leaves behind a cultural and spiritual void of immeasurable dimensions. At their peak, the Gleb spread across two square miles of virgin rainforest. Their language contained at least 24 distinct nouns describing the shape of the leaves of the Wakawaka tree, and each of those nouns had its own declension. With Gloob, not only did that unique linguistic heritage die, but so too did the the deep, spiritual relationship between the Gleb and the Wakawaka tree. A special way of seeing Wakawaka leaves has vanished. Our planet is impoverished by his passing.

And so on and so forth, blah blah fuckety blah. How many times have you seen this shit? The last speaker of a very minor language dies, the last repository of a very minor and very primitive culture dies, and a certain portion of the human race goes into paroxysms of grief and pontification.

Did you know Gloob? Were you affected by his death? Was anyone you know affected by his death? Has the vast engine of industrial civilization paused for the slightest fraction of a second to acknowledge it?

Did you know anything about the 24 (at least!) distinct Gloob nouns for the shape of the leaves of the Wakawaka tree, and their 24 (at least!) different declensions? Has their loss impoverished your usage of English? Do you give a shit? Other than linguists, does anyone who didn’t know Gloob care?

Gloob may have been a wonderful chap. His death may be a lasting sorrow to those who knew him. But in spite of the leaves of the Wakawaka tree, the effects of his death don’t extend beyond his immediate circle. Or perhaps Gloob was a rotten son of a bitch and everyone who ever came in contact with him is celebrating his death. The pontifications will be the same in either case.

There’s a good chance that while you were reading this a very good man died somewhere, causing lasting grief to those who loved him. Let’s call him John. Unless John was a major world leader, odds are you’ll never know about him or his death or the sorrow it caused. John’s death will have no effect beyond his immediate circle. Most likely, John was a speaker of English or Mandarin or Spanish or Arabic. His death will have no effect on those languages or world culture or our relationship to the Wakawaka tree. The only difference between John and Gloob is that no self-important bloviators will pontificate about how John’s death diminishes us all.

David’s Definitions for June 2010

Travail

Hard work, especially painful or extremely unpleasant work. It used to also refer to the painful experience of giving birth. It comes from the old French word travailler, which could mean to work hard or to torture. In turn, that came from the Latin word trepaliare, to torture. In case you care, that Latin word came from the Latin word tripalium, a three-pronged instrument of torture, which in turn came from the Latin tri, three, and palus, stake. We get our world pole from that last Latin word. Think of all of this when the alarm goes off tomorrow morning. By the way, you might suspect that our word travel also comes from the French word travailler, because they look so similar. Indeed it does. Travel showed up in English in the 1300s, a time when traveling was a pretty arduous and dangerous undertaking. At least they didn't have alarm clocks, although some of those old English travelers must have fantasized about torturing the roosters that woke them up.

(Will be published in the June 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

David’s Definitions for May 2010

Pilot

In modern usage, this almost always means a person who controls the flight of an airplane. We also use it as a verb: To pilot a plane. The word first appeared in English in the early 1500s, and originally it referred to the person who controls the direction of a ship. In the 1800s, it came to mean the person who controls a balloon. It didn't take on the airplane meaning until the early 20th century. It stems from a Greek word, pedon, meaning "steering oar." That word is related to the Greek word pous, "a foot." So pilot is distantly related to octopus ("eight-footed") and podiatrist (someone who treats ailments of the feet). At one time, podiatrists treated ailments of the hands as well and were called chiropodists, from the Greek word for hand, chiro, combined with the Greek word for foot. A related word is chiropractor, combining the Greek word for hand and the Greek word praktikos, "practical." Which brings us back to pilot, because after you spend a few hours crammed into a modern airline seat, you need a chiropractor to straighten you out again.

(Will be published in the May 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

I don’t have a criminal record

Sometimes, waiting for a response to job applications, I have this irrational fear that some guy with the same name as me has a criminal record, which shows up when potential employers do a routine check. But I'll never know. So I should think about other things and not let myself go crazy. That's what the giant, fanged rabbit keeps telling me. He says I should worry instead about the coming end of the world.

Coffee Party

I just went to a local Coffee Party meeting and left before it ended. Too weak, too diluted, too much emphasis on holding hands and playing nice and working together. It's not left or right, Republican or Democratic, not an answer to the Tea Party. It's just lots of good intentions and optimism.

Also, despite the lip service to the organization being grass roots and bottom up, the whole event was predetermined and dominated by the moderator and his script, which parroted what's on the Coffee Party Web site.

I want an organization that will tap into and represent the anger of the left. I don't know if such an organization would have a political impact, but I don't think the Coffee Party will, either.

Ghastly executions and cheering crowds

But not in movies. For some reason, with the occasional exception of Westerns, Hollywood likes to portray the crowds attending grisly public executions as being horrified by what they’re watching and filled with sympathy for the prisoner.

I’m pretty sure I remember the protracted, gruesome execution of William Wallace being depicted that way in the terrible Mel Gibson movie (or is that redundant?) Braveheart. I’m quite sure I remember the execution of Guy Fawkes being depicted that way in the movie V for Vendetta.

I suspect that in reality, in both cases the crowd was cheering on the executioners. After all, the crowd knew what to expect in such executions, and if they found the drawn-out torture and death of a prisoner so repulsive, they probably wouldn’t have attended. It’s my understanding that public executions in England, and probably elsewhere, were considered wonderful spectacles, and people went there to be entertained by the awful suffering and exposed viscera of the condemned.

Moreover, Wallace was not a hero to the English. In their eyes, he was “an outlaw, a murderer, the perpetrator of atrocities and a traitor” – an accurate view, given his violent, destructive raids into (civilian!) England. Nor was Fawkes a champion of liberty and opponent of royal tyranny as implied by that entertaining but fundamentally silly movie. Had the Gunpowder Plot succeeded, many innocent people would have died along with the targeted ruling class, and the country would have been plunged into chaos. That chaos, the plotters hoped, would have been followed by the institution of a Catholic monarchy that would have been far more repressive than the rule of James I. So the crowd was probably very happy to see Fawkes being slowly dispatched.

In fact, I suspect that there were many older people in the crowd who were disgusted. I can imagine one of them saying, “These executioners, they’re going to make that fellow die too quickly. He’s not going to suffer anywhere near enough. Why, when I was a lad, torturers and executioners really knew their business. They could draw it out for days, I’m telling you. Ah, well, what can you expect? These are evil and declining days, and the country’s going to the dogs. Dogs! Did I ever tell you about the time I saw a man torn apart by a pack of hungry dogs? That was back in the good old days.”

Enlarged prostate

That’s the sort of thing one thinks about more often, as one gets older. At least, if one is a oner and not a oness.

A few years ago, I read that 50% of men aged 50 have an enlarged prostate. (How enlarged? The article didn’t say.) Or benign prostatic hyperplasia, BPH, which sounds so much less scary. Or possibly more.

The same article said that the rate increases to 60% at age 60. And 70% at age 70. It’s linear!

Surely those numbers were rounded off. My father is almost 101, so I have some hopes of living at least that long myself. Does that mean that I can be 100% sure of having BPH at age 100?

And what happens after that? If every man age 100 or over has BPH, then in order for that line on the graph to continue upward linearly (which of course it has to do because that’s the way it worked in the old science fiction stories I read as a kid, and those are the source for my understanding of the workings of the Universe), then old women would have to start getting BPH, too, which is of course impossible.

Perhaps after age 100, the line suddenly turns downward. If you make it past 100, your prostate starts to shrink again! (I could ask my father, but I hate to give him another reason to talk to me about his prostate gland.)

I can imagine a conversation between an old guy and his doctor.

Doctor: Joe, I have good news and bad news for you.

Joe: What’s the bad news?

Doctor: Those problems you have urinating, it’s because you have BPH. (Explains what that is.) And it’s going to keep getting worse.

Joe: Well, that’s a pisser. Not. What’s the good news?

Doctor: You’re 90 years old. If you can make it for another ten years, your prostate is going to start shrinking again.

Joe: That’s good news? All I have to do is hang on for ten years, and I’ll be able to pee again?

David’s Definitions for April 2010

At Loggerheads

When people are at loggerheads, they are in conflict and unable to agree. The origin of the phrase is apparently unclear. In 16th-century England, a loggerhead was a heavy block of wood to which horses were tethered to keep them from wandering away. In those days, loggerhead also meant a stupid person, a blockhead. In the next century, a certain kind of heavy iron tool was also called a loggerhead. The assumption is that people who were in conflict were said to be at loggerheads because the conflict makes one think of fighting with such dangerous items. The original meaning of loggerhead survives in the name of the loggerhead turtle, which is named that because of its unusually large head.

(Will be published in the April 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

I'm collecting all of these (but I’m way behind) at:
http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Unclose shave at the Olympics

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post complaining about the stupid stubble look on men. Three-day whiskers. The absurd Miami Vice look, made popular by a TV show that’s probably unknown to the young men who are forgetting to shave in this century. Some older men, too, for God’s sake.

As is always the case, an incisive post on my blog somehow failed to change the world. And now, two years later, scraggly whiskers abound at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, an otherwise beautiful city. Okay, the female athletes are still beautiful. It’s the men who all look like Skid Row bums.

I tell ya, thanks to the overly flamboyant costumes, we can even see that some of the male figure skaters and ice dancers have more hair on their chins than their chests.

As for the skiers, someone ought to tell them that a clean shave might shave a hundredth of a second off their downhill times. I have no idea if that’s true, but someone ought to tell them that, anyway.

Spam comments

What's with spam comments on blogs?

This blog gets a lot of commercial spam in the comments section. I also see generic comments that say something like "Thanks for the info. I'd like to read more about this topic." That one shows up on other blogs, as well. It's strange, and of course very annoying and cluttering.

The Very Lucky Executive

There was this man named Hova. Jeremy. He was a remarkably lucky guy.

First, he was lucky enough to get a job in awful times. Second, despite lacking any ability, he was lucky enough to be promoted quickly, eventually becoming president of the company. That’s not unusual. It’s even fairly common. Some people just seem to make a good impression. But Jerry wasn’t particularly intelligent or good looking. He lacked charisma and, truth be told, was often unpleasant to be around. He was just lucky.

But all of that’s nothing compared to the run of luck Jerry had next.

Jerry chose a seaside location for his company’s new factory and the adjacent giant apartment complex housing the workers. He was warned that the site was on an active earthquake fault and next to an active volcano, but he brushed that aside. A year later, the factory was up and running and the apartment complex was filled with the workers and their families. Pats on the back from the Board of Directors for Jerry, plus a bonus. Then a massive earthquake struck. And a huge volcanic eruption. Followed by a tsunami. The factory was eliminated. Coincidentally, so were the workers and their families.

The Board met in emergency session to praise Jerry and beg him to save the company. Utterly irrational of them, of course, but I told you he was a lucky guy. The Board was convinced that what had happened was part of some large, brilliant plan of Jerry’s, and they were sure that they simply weren’t intelligent enough to understand what he was doing. It was best to let him press on and not interfere with him.

Jerry decided to shift the company’s emphasis to agribusiness. He had his eye on vast tracts of land in a third-world country that would be perfect. Unfortunately, the land was already occupied by some peasants who refused to move. So Jerry used corporate funds to set up and arm a fake rebel movement that drove the peasants away. Well, the few who survived were driven away. The others became involuntary fertilizer for the company’s new agricultural products. The Board applauded Jerry for his innovative thinking and awarded him another bonus. Crops were bountiful, and soon company-branded edibles were flooding markets in the developed world. Unfortunately, previously unknown deadly viruses and bacteria and parasites flooded in with them. Soon bodies filled the streets and highrises of London, Paris, New York, etc.

Once again, the Board met in emergency session to praise Jerry and beg him to save them. If anything, they admired the opacity of his brilliance all the more.

And so it went, year after year, decade after decade. Board members came and went, but Jerry stayed on, constantly making dreadful mistakes that cost huge numbers of lives, constantly being praised and rewarded for his work. It was a wonder that the company survived, and yet in fact it thrived. It became the largest, richest, most powerful corporation on Earth, possibly the most powerful entity of any kind. Jerry’s judgment and wisdom and foresight became the stuff of legends. Sometimes, one person or one small piece of equipment managed to survive one of these Jerry-induced disasters. This was seen as all the proof anyone needed of Jerry’s careful planning and deep compassion.

The next step was obvious: President of the World. Jerry’s making plans for that right now.

What a lucky guy! Wouldn’t you like to be as lucky as J. Hova?

David’s Definitions for March 2010

Ironic

When used to refer to an event, it means contrary to what's expected, in a striking or poignant or tragic way. It derives from a Greek word meaning "to lie" or "to be insincere." Here's an example of irony: "The speaker, who was famous for his command of the English language, clearly didn't know the difference between ironically and coincidentally." People do often confuse those two words. Here's an example of coincidence, with nothing ironic about it: "The speaker had a third cousin named Hepzibah. So did the man who introduced him." There's nothing about this coincidence that is strikingly contrary to what you expect, so it's not ironic.

(Will be published in the March 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

I'm collecting all of these (but I’m way behind) at:
http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Avatar made me blue

Because I wasted time and money watching it.

Mind you, it’s not because of the movie’s pinko, liberal, anti-imperialist, fuzzy-minded, bleeding-heart, liberal, tree-hugger message. I’m a pinko, liberal, anti-imperialist, etc. myself. I’m part of this movie’s natural audience. And yet I hated it.

Basic story: Alien world has mineral Earth badly wants and needs. Human beings set about strip mining the place. World’s inhabitants, ten-foot tall blue aliens with tails, are upset. Humans create their own ten-foot tall blue aliens with tails, telepathically controlled by humans and called avatars, to deal with the aliens. Our hero, one of those telepathic controllers, ends up preferring being an alien, switches sides, and leads a successful alien revolt.

Not wanting to wear the special glasses, we decided to skip the 3-D version and watch it in 2-D. I accepted that it wouldn’t be as visually interesting in 2-D, but I didn’t expect all of the characters to be two-dimensional. I don’t think the special glasses would have helped with that. I don’t mind good guys vs. bad guys, and I always prefer it when the good guys end up winning. But it helps when both good and bad guys are also real people, with believable motivations and human characteristics.

Speaking of which, the Simpsons are more human and believable than Avatar’s CGI aliens and their world. Hell, the actors in rubber suits and the papier-mâché rocks on the original Star Trek TV show (the only real Star Trek TV show!) were more believable than Avatar’s aliens and their world. For all the high tech and big bucks, the blue aliens and their lush world are a cartoon from beginning to end. I never believed any of it.

Details bothered me. For instance, the aliens we see the most of live in a giant tree. But their feet are flat and inflexible, with short toes, just like ours. The movie makers didn’t think about what the aliens’ feet should have looked like. They just copied human feet. Big budget for CGI, but small budget for thinking.

Don’t assume that I’m an elitist snob who normally prefers serious movies that delve into the human condition and were made in France. I avoid such movies like the plague. I insist on escape. Science fiction, fantasy, horror, comedy, and preferably a few good explosions and shootouts – that’s what draws me to the theater. I was looking forward to escaping into the alien world of Avatar. I tried hard for the movie’s full 18 hours but never succeeded.

The plot is clichéd and predictable from one scene to the next. The action scenes are devoid of tension. Not only are they cartoonish, they’re dull cartoonish. Think of the absurdity of the truck-freeway-jet-fighter segment in the last Die Hard movie, and replace Bruce Willis and the truck and the freeway and the jet fighter with cartoon blue aliens and flying lizards and humans in armed flying machines. Character deaths are predictable and devoid of emotion, and character escapes from peril violate both physics and physiology.

The relationships are passionless. We are expected to believe in them, but the actors, whether human or CGId into aliens, give us no reason to do so.

The alien society is an awkward mix of generic tribal American Indian and generic tribal African. This is symbolism of shameless nakedness. It punches us in the mouth and orders us to feel guilty for the sins of European and American expansion.

The aliens’ embarrassingly silly Earth-mother religion is glossed over with a pretense of science that is as unconvincing as the aliens themselves. They are deeply in tune with their world (take that, you urbanized, industrialized EuroAmericans!), but that doesn’t stop them from murdering peaceful herbivores for food, even though they’re surrounded by a bountiful forest with plentiful and delicious fruit. Okay, so they say mystical garbage to the herbivores before they finish them off. Big deal. The herbivore, gasping in agony from the arrow our hero has shot into him in one scene, might be wondering why the blue chap is now sticking a humongous knife into him. “In the name of the earth mother,” the herbivore might be thinking, “why aren’t you a vegetarian?”

In the end, the good guys win and the bad guys lose. But the bad guys are the empire, with its vast resources and advanced technology, especially ways of blowing things up real good, whereas the good guys are just primitive blue aliens. In real history, empires often lose such first skirmishes due to underestimating the primitives and the terrain and the logistics. Empires learn from these failures and return with overwhelming force. That’s why I’m writing this in a Western language, using Western technology, while living in what used to be land occupied by non-Westerners.

So in reality, the blue aliens would lose in the long run. If they were lucky, they’d end up on reservations. If not, they’d be eliminated. Either way, the end result would be the strip mining of the planet.

Or perhaps the aliens will accept the inevitable and make a deal with the mining company. They’ll grant mining concessions to the humans, and in return they’ll be given human weapons, which they will use to conquer and enslave the other clans of aliens whom we glimpse at the end of the movie. We’ve already seen that these simple, gentle, loving, living-in-harmony-with-nature aliens have a warrior caste and a warrior ethos. Hmm. Where did those guys come from?

Mirror malfunctions

We’ve lived in this house for just over 38 years, and in general it’s held up fairly well. However, I’ve become increasingly aware that the mirrors are deteriorating. It’s not just the few remaining original mirrors either. There’s something in the house that seems to have damaged the newer ones, as well.

When we moved in, the mirrors showed me the man I expected to see. But increasingly, the degraded surfaces have distorted my image, giving me sagging jowls and wrinkled skin, and they seem unable to reflect my full head of hair.

I’m also becoming disenchanted with digital cameras. When we first switched to them, I thought they were a huge improvement over the old kind, with the bother of loading film and getting it developed and printed. But when I look at the pictures we took of me with those old gadgets and compare them to the pictures taken of me with our digital cameras, the difference is shocking. It’s a lot like the problem with the mirrors.

On the bright side, CGI keeps improving. Maybe that will provide the solution to both of these technological problems.

David’s Definitions for February 2010

Hapless

Unfortunate, luckless, unlucky. It comes from an old word, hap, which originally meant luck or chance and then later came to mean good luck. We don't use hapless in modern English, but we do use other words that come from the same root. For example, happen was originally happenen and it meant "occur by hap." If you're happy, you possess hap, good fortune. Haphazard, meaning irregular or disordered, comes from combining hap with hazard, which was a game played with dice.

(Will be published in the February 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

WIPing along, again

I’ve been working fairly steadily on the Work In Progress, working title Chains, as you can see from the graph on the right.

The stepwise nature of the graph isn’t what I’d like to see. The steps are the result of long periods of little or no productivity, until recently. It would be great if the line on the graph were fairly straight and at a 45 degree angle – or even better, around 60 degrees.

Better than flatlining, though.

This here’s Winkel’s town, pahdnah

And don’t yew fergit it.

When I was a boy (traditional opening of stories told by old guys), my family moved from South Africa to the US. We didn’t stay here long, that time, but it was long enough for me to watch every cowboy show I could on TV and every cowboy movie I could in the theaters. At that time, there were a lot of both.

Then we moved back to South Africa. I was 10 at this point. We moved to a town named Rustenburg in the Transvaal, the deepest depths of the Afrikaner homeland, an area that had played a huge role in Boer history. Afrikaners in those days felt that there was considerable similarity between their ancestors of Great Trek days and the Americans who settled the Wild West, and the local library had a huge collection of cowboy novels. (No one called them Westerns in those days.) I devoured them all.

Rustenburg was a small town then, with one main street, which had lots of small shops owned by individual proprietors. (Yes, this was during Apartheid, so those were white shops, for use by whites only. At 10, I wasn’t aware of any of that.) The main street was paved, but because of the sun, there was a wooden canopy over the sidewalk, supported by posts. It looked a lot like the main streets in those beloved cowboy movies. Most of the stores had signs in front of them that said DuPlessis se Winkel and Smith se Winkel and so on – in each case, an English or Afrikaans surname followed by se Winkel.

During our brief stay in the US, I had forgotten whatever Afrikaans I had known before, so I deduced that se meant and and that Winkel was the name of some powerful rancher with a mighty big spread just outside town who had forced all these honest but cowardly shop owners to fork over a 50% ownership in their shops. All that was needed was for a hero on a white horse to ride into town and set everything right. All I had to do was be there when that happened.

And then I started learning Afrikaans and discovered that se is a possessive, um, something or other (preposition?), and Winkel means shop, and all those signs just meant So and So’s Shop. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was.

Three reasons I don’t plan to see Invictus …

… despite my being an ex-South African who was moved by the episode the movie depicts and despite loving that poem.

1. Movies are for escape. I have no interest in serious depictions of serious matters in which stuff doesn’t get blowed up real good and there are neither monsters nor space ships. Major babes are also helpful, but they’re not sufficient in and of themselves. Of course, this objection applies to many other movies, too.
2. I’m sick to death of the unspoken belief that South African history began with the end of Apartheid. Both white and black history in South Africa extends far back beyond that and is full of fascinating stories – and many of them actually have nothing to do with race relations! Even those enormous figures who did have a great impact on race relations had interesting and important lives outside that area. (And black history in South Africa involves more than Chaka and Mandela.)
3. I’m even sicker of movies set in South Africa in which South African characters are played by American actors. Yeah, I know about box office. It’s also possible that Eastwood is friends with Damon and Freeman and wanted to work with them. I don’t care. South Africa has a movie industry of its own and a goodly supply of fine actors, black and white. They’d work for less than the Hollywood stars, they’d do a better job, and they’d get the accents right. South African actors are also objecting. Let’s hope that does some good.

Today’s stupid criminal trick

Teens arrested by police on suspicion of stealing cars ask if they've set a record for most cars stolen in one day. 

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_13900186

They always land on cars

On tonight’s episode of Heroes (which you should be watching because it’s still a great show no matter what the self-consciously jaded masses say), a character commits suicide by jumping off a tall building. (Nathan Petrelli. And this time, he’s really dead.) (Oh! Spoiler warning!) (Oops! Too late!)

He falls in rather overdone slow motion and lands … on a car. Even though the alley below is almost deserted and there seem to be only two cars parked anywhere nearby, he manages nonetheless to hit one of them squarely and smash its roof in.

Why don’t onscreen deaths-by-falling-from-high-buildings never, nowadays, end with the character landing on the concrete with a splatsplash? It’s almost always a car. More dramatic, I suppose, but still it’s one of those silly clichés that very much interfere with my willing suspension of disbelief.

On the positive side, the car landing in this TV episode wasn’t followed by the car alarm going off.

Black Friday Boycott

I hope this proposed boycott has failed miserably. No doubt it’s nice to have the luxury to wax high minded about crass commercialism, but those of us who are out of work need an orgy of buying by those who have jobs so that hiring will pick up in January.

Zombie dreams

I've been dreaming of zombies, probably because I recently sent a zombie story out. I wake up in the middle of the night and pick holes in the dream's plot, but that doesn't help me go back to sleep.

The story was a bit unsettling, but the dreams are more so. There’s something about being in the action, in full color in the most recent case, that makes it much more disturbing than any prose can be.

I hope tonight’s better. So long as it’s not vampires …

David’s Definitions for January 2010

Peregrination

A journey, especially a journey on foot to a foreign country. The root is a Latin word that means foreigner. The word pilgrim comes from the same root. Peregrination is not a word you run into normally in modern English, but we do still speak of a peregrine falcon, which is called that because at one time it was standard practice to capture those birds on their first flight, or pilgrimage, from their nest.

(Will be published in the January 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

The system of male and female reverse!

I posted a while ago about Japanese advertisements for porno and/or dating sites showing up frequently in the comments section of an earlier blog post.

For a change, I decided to enter the latest comment into the Google translation site and see what English resulted. Here it is:

dating back to topic now! Do you have experience already? This site has a choice about adopting the system of male and female reverse Supporters hope. More financially successful woman is hungry for love that is rich. Now from the page of interest

Oh, those hopeful supporters!

David’s Definitions for December 2009

Moot

To bring something up for discussion. At one time, moot could also refer to the discussion itself. This usage no longer survives in ordinary English, but it's still used in law school, where a moot court is a simulated court proceeding, part of the training of law students. Originally, a moot question was one that could be debated or was subject to argument. At some point in the 19th century, it came to mean a question that was no longer worth discussing, or one that had no practical application outside the realm of debate. The word traces back to 12th century England, when it referred to a meeting of the freemen of a shire to discuss local issues. In turn, it came from the even older word gemot, which was a meeting of freemen assembled to discuss issues or impose justice.

(Will be published in the December 2009 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

Hate mail

In response to this essay on our Web site:

I read your mindless 'manifesto'  (sounds SO euro-for the people!)

You liberals are such wandering and aimless idiots. Your ultimate goal is nothing short of eradication of all the moral values of TRUE Americans, those who pattern themselves after the original revolutionaries who established this great country.  

Your only hope is in sheer numbers, since you fail miserably in moral fiber, original ideas and true partisanship.  You fools have no idea what it takes to build UP a country, only what it takes to tear one down.  And an that you're minions are doing a hell of a job!

Credit where due: This one was actually written in English.

Basal on my shoulder

Makes me unhappy.
Basal on my shoulder
Makes me frown.

The song John Denver never sang.

I have a basal carcinoma on my shoulder, which will be cut out on November 3. This might affect my weightlifting regimen. Such as it is.

It’s supposed to be the least dangerous kind of skin cancer, fortunately.

Once again, I wish I could go back in time and lecture my boy self about the sun and sunburn. Of course he wouldn’t have listened to some weird, old guy. Kids those days!

A Public Fine and Private Place

The story is now visible to the world at:

http://theferalpages.com/issue1/?page_id=30

A Fine and Private Place

Title of a ghost story of mine, taken from the marvelous poem “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell (a poem which, I once read, has provided more titles than any other, and no wonder).

It will be published in the new online magazine The Feral Pages, in the October/November issue. Thanks to Chris Holm for alerting me to the magazine, which has also acquired a story of his.

The editor wrote the following to me. (If I had a smaller ego I’d be embarrassed. If I had any shame, I wouldn’t reproduce his words here.)

This is a marvelously complex piece with which I am still peeling back the layers. I discover something new every time I read it. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to publish it.

Screwed by the state

When I was laid off by Quark in mid-May, I applied immediately for Colorado unemployment benefits. Everything sailed through smoothly. Oodles of paperwork arrived in the mail – notification of approval, how much I’d get, when it would start, what I had to do every week, and a thick book telling me the rules and Dos and Don’ts and procedures.

Included in the book was a brief sentence saying that I was required to notify the state if I withdrew money from a 401(K) to which my employer had contributed.

As it happened, my 401K had been doing surprisingly well, despite the financial meltdown. I made what seemed to be a very prudent decision. Since I had to move the money out of my now ex-employer’s 401(K) plan, I decided to roll half of it over into an IRS and use the other half to get us (finally!) completely out of debt, eliminating what had been a burdensome monthly payment. (The result of youthful indiscretions combined with some unavoidable emergencies. We’d been painstakingly paying down that result for years.) What a relief that was! And how much easier it would make it to survive on unemployment benefits while I searched for a new job.

Of course I notified the state about it. I figured that they would delay the beginning of my unemployment checks by a few more weeks because they would treat one-half of the employer’s contribution to my 401K as part of my severance package. That would have been fair and reasonable.

Then I received a letter from the state saying that under Sections 8-73-110 (3) (A) & (C) of the Colorado Employment Security Act, since I did not reinvest every penny of the 401(K) in an IRA or Keogh plan, the entire amount of the 401(K) was being treated as a lump-sum retirement payment. This delayed the start of my unemployment benefits until March of 2010.

I appealed, noting that I had reinvested half of the 401(K) in an IRA, and moreover that of the half I had withdrawn for my use, only a small portion was my employer’s money, as opposed to my own. Would I have been penalized the same way if the money had come from a regular savings account? No. Would it have hurt the state to mention this bizarre law in the thick booklet it sent to me? No.

I was given a hearing date. I went on schedule. I repeated all of the above objections to a hearing officer named Benedict, a tired man despite my being his first appointment of the day, a distracted man, an uninvolved man. He’d heard it all before. (To be fair, perhaps he was sympathetic but had been trained not to show it.) As I expected, the appeal was denied.

So there’s a law on the books that affects your unemployment benefits, but the booklet from the state that tells you what you need to know when you apply for unemployment doesn’t tell you about that law. It tells you that you must notify the state about a 401(K) withdrawal, but it doesn’t tell you what the consequences of such a withdrawal are.

I’m not living in Colorado. I’m living in Kafkarado.

Pull on your pant and flex your bicep

I was shopping at Costco today and saw a sign, above a pile of clothing, that read MEN’S PANT. They also sell WOMEN’S PANT.

This misuse has been around for a long time (more than a century, according to this site), but I’ll never get used to seeing it. It bugs me every time.

Some people can’t understand that some words are only plural.

Another such common mistake is bicep. People seem to think that you have one bicep on each arm and hence two biceps in total. No, you have one biceps on each arm; the name is plural because of the double attachment to the bone. At the back of each arm, you have one triceps, which has three attachments. On each thigh you have one quadriceps. So many attachments! So many opportunities for detachment! I tore one of those attachments mostly off in my right biceps years ago, but assume that muscle is still my biceps, not my unicep.

I haven’t yet heard anyone refer to cutting paper with a scissor, but I’m expecting it to happen.

Addendum:

This is another common and somewhat related error. I just ran into it on Facebook: An individual being referred to as a homo sapien. I suppose people think that sapiens is a plural form, whereas it’s simply a Latin ending, and singular.

David’s Definitions for November 2009

Nonplussed

At a loss for words. Also used in a more general way to mean bewildered. From the Latin non plus, no more, no further. That's simple enough. The word has been in use since the late 1500s. What's really odd is that, starting about ten years ago, it acquired the meaning "unimpressed" or "unmoved." No one knows how this happened. Perhaps people thought that it meant that someone was "not plussed." But there is no word "plussed" in English. This strange, new trend leaves me bemused - perplexed, lost in thought. "Bemused" has been around for 300 years. What strange, new meaning will it suddenly acquire?

(Will be published in the November 2009 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

Cups outlasting comments

In July, I put up a short post titled Cups outlasting companies.

For some reason, the comments for that post keep filling up with what appear to be ads for Japanese dating and porn sites. Why those sites and why that post? I am mystified.

I’ve been deleting them. If any of them are actual comments, not ads, and I’ve misinterpreted something, I hope the commenters will let me know in English. If I have not misinterpreted, I wish they’d stop.

Dvorkin Global Enterprises, Inc., Ltd., PLC, GmbH

Some time ago, as a joke, I created this page on our Web site to tell visitors about the Intergalactic Headquarters of Dvorkin Global Enterprises, Inc., Ltd., PLC, GmbH.

Yesterday, I got a letter from Google, telling me about the value of Google Adwords for my business, and addressed to Dvorkin Global Enterprises, Inc.

Giggle.

Classical Muzak

I love classical music*. Listen to it via streaming radio all the time. However, the local classical station, KVOD, spends hours every day playing shallow, derivative, tedious crap from the late 18th Century that I’m sure was background music in its day. I can just imagine someone from that time, brought forward via a time machine, listening to KVOD and shaking his head in wonder. “Dude,” he would say, in the 18th-Century equivalent, “you actually sit in concert halls listening to that crap? Man, in my day, that was playing in the background while we drank and played cards and tried to get girls to go to bed with us. You people are twisted.”

 

* Oh, come on. You know what I mean by that phrase. Don’t give me that music-history shit.

Explanation of Benefits

I'm cleaning up my desk, which means processing old paperwork that I should have processed long ago. In the stack is a bunch of messages from so-called health insurance companies titled "Explanation of Benefits". But these are really shallow excuses for denial of benefits. They ought at least to be honest and label those letters "Benefits Denied and Suck on It".

Evil government medical programs

Leonore and I went to Walgreens today to get (seasonal) flu shots. United Health Care, the insurance plan for which we pay an absurd amount each month, soon to become almost three times as absurd, didn’t cover Leonore’s shot. Our cost: $25. Medicare covered my shot. Our cost: $0.

In an earlier post, I told Barack that he coulda been a contendah. One way would have been to propose expanding Medicare to everyone, with some major upgrades to the system itself and to Medicare taxes. Too late now, of course.

Lemonade Stand Award

Which you can see displayed off to the right. It came from here, and now it’s my turn to do my part.

I hereby bestow the Lemonade Stand Award on (may I have the envelope, please) the following (cue the trumpets) blog(ger)s:

Chris Holm

Travis Erwin

Kristen Tsetsi

Mitch Wagner

Stephen Blackmoore

There are other writer blogs I read and enjoy, and it’s hard to choose from among them those that I think deserve a special award. What makes these stand out, for me, is that these bloggers share both their writing and their lives with us and that each does so with a unique voice. When Google Reader says that one of them has a new post up, I’m delighted and look forward to reading it.

The Jews. All they care about is money.

I don’t know what reminded me of this. Perhaps it was the recent commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the start of World War Two. (How many Americans were surprised to learn that WWII began in September of 1939 and not December of 1941?)

Some years ago, descendants of Jews whose artworks and other valuables had been stolen by the Nazis were in court trying to get the goods back. Back from a government that claimed it owned those items because they had been willed to it by the Nazis who had stolen it or because the items had been signed over to the state by the Jewish owners. Any civilized person would surely agree that thieves have no right to will their stolen booty to anyone and that if the original owners had signed their goods over to the Nazi state, it was under duress and those agreements are invalid.

Consider, too, that the thieves involved were the same people who, in their insane lust for Jewish gold, cut the fingers off concentration camp victims to get their rings, tore earrings from the ears of living prisoners and gold fillings from their teeth.

While the court case brought by descendants of those Jews was in the news, I heard a man-in-the-street interview on the radio with people in Germany. What did they think of this lawsuit? Should those descendants be awarded possession of the goods stolen from their forebears by evil, amoral, blood-and-gold-lusting barbarians? (Obviously, that wasn’t quite the question the interviewer asked.)

I can’t forget the answer of one young German woman, possibly the granddaughter of one of those beasts who cut off fingers to get gold rings, who tore earlobes and yanked out teeth to get Jewish gold. “The Jews,” she said, with a sneer you could hear. “All they care about is money.”

Lot’s and lot’s

I was exchanging IMs with someone this morning and realized belatedly that I had written lot’s for lots.

I hate the way such crap has insinuated itself into my unconscious. It seems to be happening increasingly. Frequent reading of other people’s grammatical transgressions is damaging my brain circuits!

David’s Definitions for October 2009

Sterling

This word has three meanings, and they're all closely related. It can refer to the pound, the unit of currency in the United Kingdom and some of its dependencies. It can refer to a grade of silver. It can refer to a high level of character, for example, "He is a man of sterling character." In Medieval England, a common type of coin was a silver penny. It was stamped with a small star - in Medieval English, a sterling. The coin itself came to be called a sterling. People who dealt in large payments would measure them in pounds of silver pennies. Eventually, a pound of sterlings became a standard unit of currency itself - a pound sterling. When the government standardized the amount of silver that the pennies had to contain, silver of that quality came to be called sterling silver, and anything of reliable, standard quality was said to be sterling.

(Will be published in the October 2009 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

I wonder why the fundies aren’t going after SyFy

A lot of the movies shown on Saturday and Sunday nights on SyFy, whether made for the network or old theatrical/DVD releases, are reworkings of Greek mythology in which the gods are real and magical stuff happens.

At one point, the wackadoodles attacked Harry Potter, but then they backed off. I suppose they realized that that fan base was too large and devoted, and it would be a losing battle for them. I’d love to see them work themselves up into manufactured outrage over SyFy’s movies and end up looking like asses.

Three British soldiers died in Afghanistan today

Let’s hope some good poetry comes of this, at any rate.

And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall thank their lucky stars they were not there.

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries
And lack of single-payer universal health care.

You blew it, Barack. You coulda been a contendah.

“Don’t Feed the Bears”

is pretty good advice:

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_13032777

Liberals are afraid of strong, smart, independent women!

And that’s why they’re so afraid of Sarah Palin and feel the need to attack her and tear her down!

This meme was popular on the right during the 2008 presidential election, and I’m seeing it crop up again – e.g., in Facebook, where Leonore sneered at Palin and bunches of Palin supporters jumped to Palin’s defense with variations of the above canned line.

And it is so obviously canned.

Years ago, probably in an attempt to wean black voters away from the Democratic Party, the right started repeating that social programs to help blacks were part of a sinister plot by the Democrats to keep blacks weak and dependent on them. Strong, independent blacks were the Democrats’ worst fear. I heard it said quite a few times in almost exactly those words.

Perhaps there’s a group of marketeers in a hidden bunker that comes up with this crap for the GOP. Then rightwingers all over swallow the latest party line and repeat it.

Let them keep deluding themselves.

Jesus hearing aid

One my hearing aids has been malfunctioning lately. I put it away in its little felt-lined tomb a few days ago. This morning, on the third day, I tried it again, and lo! it is risen! It works again.

Well, you’d need a rest, too, if you spent all day in some guy’s ear canal.

Sequelitis

My agent is eager to see a sequel to Time and the Soldier (which won’t be known by that title, but I’m still calling it that till we settle on a new one).

When he said that, I told myself not to think about a sequel now because doing so might distract me from the novel I’m working on. But then a really cool idea popped into my head. It would tie into Time really niftily and would be fun to write. So now I can’t stop thinking about it. The cool ideas are the worst, that way.

You know, maybe I should try to do a synopsis in a really brief form, just a few paragraphs …

Alternet plagiarism

This is infuriating.

Years ago, I published an essay on our Web site titled The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed. It’s been getting lots of hits over the years, especially when someone linked to it on Slashdot.

Today, a copy of it showed up on Alternate.org, the online news and opinion publication, with a slightly modified title and with the byline of someone named Jeffrey A. Dvorkin.

Grr.

Update, the next day, 8/2:

I got an e-mail from an Alternet editor apologizing for the mixup (Jeffrey D. was in the database, so someone assumed he was the author) and also apologizing for using the essay without permission. How that last thing happened will be looked into. The attribution has been corrected. I used to think it was always a good thing for an author to have an unusual name, but now I see that it can also be a disadvantage - when there's another writer around with the same unusual name.

I'll also get a payment to soothe my hurt feelings. As Dr. Johnson said: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

David’s Definitions for September 2009

Nepotism

The act of giving a job or other preference to a relative because of the relationship and not because of competence. For example, President Kennedy was accused of nepotism when he appointed his brother Robert to the post of Attorney General. The word comes from the Latin word for nephew. In the Middle Ages, when the Pope had a son and wanted to give him some kind of office in the Church, he would introduce the young man as his nephew. Of course, he couldn't admit that the young man was actually his son, but everyone knew that he really was. So the Pope's "nephew" would get a nice job, thanks to nepotism. A related abuse is cronyism, where people give preference to their friends. That word probably comes from the 18th Century English criminal underworld, where partners in crime were referred to as a man's cronies.

(Will be published in the September 2009 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

Representation

I’m now represented by Brendan Deneen of Fineprint Literary Management.

(Woo hoo!)

Watch this space

“Space this watch,” the starship captain ordered in disgust when his expensive timepiece stopped working again.

Where were you when we landed on the moon?

And how many blog posts/Web essays/printed articles will be showing up over the next few days that ask that question? Zillions, I tell ya, zillions.

On July 20, 1969, I was in the MOCR, the Missions Operations Control Room, at MSC, the Manned Spacecraft Center, in Houston. (Later renamed the Johnson Space Center.)

Mind you, this wasn’t the MOCR that was controlling the Apollo 11 mission. This was the other MOCR. I always seem to be in the other place. Because of the time required to prepare the control center for a mission and to clean and fix it up afterwards, there were two control centers, and they alternated. So strictly speaking, I wasn’t really in the MOCR at all, if you want to be picky. Similarly, not every NASA employee worked on every mission. So some of us were working on Apollo 11 but a lot of us, including me, were working on later missions and weren’t required to be in the (real) MOCR or on call during 11.

Everything was turned off in the backup control center, but lots of us were allowed to cram into it and the conversation between Houston and the astronauts was piped in over the speakers, so that we could feel part of the live excitement.

My job focused on the the rendezvous phase, after the Lunar Module lifted off from the moon and was heading toward rendezvous with the orbiting CSM, so I didn’t know what the terse phrases I was listening to meant. I think it was mostly the astronauts reading off speed along various axes and remaining fuel. I don’t think most of the other people in the room knew, either. We all had our specialties. Dividing those enormously complex missions into numerous small phases and having each team focus just on its tiny aspect of the huge whole was one of the main secrets of NASA’s success.

At the end, after some technical jargon having to do with the LM engine, Neil Armstrong said, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” A lot of people in the room started cheering and clapping wildly. Some of us – including me – didn’t get it at first. I had expected him to say something like, “LEM on the surface.” (A lot of us still referred to the Lunar Module as the LEM, from the earlier name, the Lunar Excursion Module.) Or, in the worst case, no sound from the astronauts at all, ever. Or just possibly, “Oh, shit.”

And then we all left the room and went back to work.

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot more about moon-landing deniers. I thought those had mostly faded away long ago, but apparently something like 14% of the US population either think the whole thing was a hoax or aren’t sure. Well, idiocy will always be with us. I have to say that if the landings were a hoax, I wish I had known that at the time. I was in my twenties with a wife and child at home whom I yearned to be spending all my time with, and if my work was pointless anyway, I’d have spent far fewer extra hours at the office.

I didn’t get any exercise yesterday

But I did write a scene in which a character lifted weights. Does that count?

Train vs. tornado

Guess which one wins.

http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/167988/detail/

Cups outlasting companies

I was washing dishes this evening (no, we don’t have a dishwasher) (the mechanical kind, that is), when it struck me that some of the cups and glasses we use are imprinted with the logos of software companies where I used to work – and the companies are gone, but the cups and glasses are just fine.

“Gone” can mean acquired or evaporated. In either case, the companies where I worked don’t exist. But the logos and the breakable items bearing them go on and on. It’s sorta like some kind of metaphor for the software biz, man!

Green shoots

Here we are on the first day of the second half of the year, and I got a whole bunch of promising job-related nibbles and bites today. It’s a sample population of one, and maybe nothing will come of any of these contacts, but the sudden increase is striking, and it makes me hopeful – for me, and for everyone else.

No agent nibbles, unfortunately. (Every silver lining has a dark cloud.)

SFWA

It's time for my annual internal debate about whether to renew my membership in SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America. Every year I wonder if there's any real point to it. This year, I'm also worried about the money. I suppose if I get a job before the deadline, I'll probably sigh and grumble and shake my head and write the check, just as I did last year.

Coming up: the same internal debate about renewing my membership in HWA, the Horror Writers Association.

The economic upturn that matters most

I’m seeing more job postings for developers and tech writers, and I’ve been getting more nibbles, including an interview today. All of which is of course very encouraging and a hopeful sign for the future.

But I’m wondering when we’ll see the rise in the statistic that matters most: number of new books being bought by publishers. That one should be explooooding any day now!

Stop living from paycheck to paycheck!

I just got an e-mail that promised to tell me the secrets that will enable me to stop living from paycheck to paycheck. Hah! I cast heaps of scorn upon your secret information!

All on my own, without the help of strangers who send spam e-mails, I have learned how one stops living from paycheck to paycheck. Me and millions of other people. All you have to do is get laid off.

The explosions in the street have finally stopped for the night

The yahoolings are nestled all snug in their beds,

While visions of cherry bombs dance in their heads.

David’s Definitions for August 2009

Husband

The man in a marriage. Originally, the word had a rather different meaning, which survives in specialized ways. It comes from the Old Norse word husbondi meaning “master of a household.” That word had nothing to do with whether the man was married. When the Norsemen settled in England, they often married local, Anglo-Saxon women. The Anglo-Saxon word for a married woman, wif, continued to be used for those women. That became our word wife. But because such marriages were so common, the Anglo-Saxon term for a husband, wer, was gradually replaced by the Norse husbondi, which became our word husband. The master of a household took care of the land, the animals, and all the other resources associated with his property — good care, if he was a good husbondi. So farming was once called “husbandry,” and taking care of farm animals is still called “animal husbandry.” We also still speak of “husbanding resources” — i.e., taking care to preserve them. In nautical usage, the person who manages a ship’s expenses and receipts is called the “ship’s husband.”

(Will be published in the August 2009 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

Arc of the moral universe

“Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” – Martin Luther King, 1967

I’ve been seeing this line quoted a lot lately (or misquoted or paraphrased). The sentiment King expressed may be a comforting one, but it’s bullshit.

It boils down to karma, what goes around comes around, and similar nonsense. Obviously, such beliefs make no sense unless you believe in a guiding force or principle behind everything. Karma, the moral universe, God – at base, it’s all the same thing and it’s all wishful thinking.

It’s uncomfortable to think that the universe has no form of intelligence or morality, that evil goes unpunished, that good is not rewarded, and so on. But that’s what the lack of evidence for the opposite leaves us with.

Newest blogger in the family

I got Leonore blogging: http://denverspanishtutor.blogspot.com

Only theologians can be atheists

At least, that’s the conclusion one has to draw from the latest ploy used by a certain contingent (cabal!) of theists to argue against atheism.

More properly, they’re arguing against public expression by the most visible atheists – e.g., Dawkins – rather than against atheism itself. But of course their real purpose is to keep those visible atheists from making atheism respectable and appealing.

So they’re now grumbling that Dawkins and his like must not publish books attacking religion unless they can show that they’ve studied the literature of theism in depth. Unable to defend their wacky fundamental belief – the existence of invisible Sky Daddy – these theists are trying to divert the debate into an argument about irrelevant details. If you can’t demonstrate an intimate knowledge of all the convoluted arguments about just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, then you’re not allowed to ask for proof that angels exist.

So let’s engage in a thought experiment.

Suppose that long ago, a hunting party of American Indians in western Colorado, while sitting around the campfire in the evening, had a religious experience, a series of visions, orgasmic and transporting. They imagined that somewhere nearby was an immense but invisible and undetectable rock, and that the rock was speaking to them. They dreamed that the rock told them it had created the world, including them. So they worshiped the invisible rock and sacrificed animals and passing Spaniards to it.

Once Anglos began pouring into the area, large numbers of the white settlers converted to what they called Rockism. From the city that grew up around the imagined site of the invisible rock, thousands, then millions, of pages of detailed theology flowed out around the world. Hundreds of millions of people converted to Rockism.

Rockist theologians, including some of the most brilliant minds on earth, spent their lives arguing with each other about the exact order in which the rock created the various parts of the world, and whether it created the rest of the universe first, or later, or simultaneously. Should they use the newest technology to try to actually detect the rock and determine its nature, or would that be blasphemy? Did the rock extend down to the center of the earth? Up as far as the orbit of the moon? And so on and on and on.

Any sensible person would say, “Prove to me that this rock exists.” Who in his right mind would think it necessary to read all of the Rockist theological drivel before declaring the whole religion to be utter nonsense?

Using Windows Live Writer

I created and published the previous post using Windows Live Writer, a blog editor for PCs, that I had just installed.

I’m very impressed with it and would recommend it to anyone who blogs from a PC. And no, Microsoft did not pay me for this endorsement. If they want to send me a check for a zillion bucks in gratitude, I won’t say no, despite being an obscure blogger whose blog hardly anyone reads and whose opinion is therefore of little moment.

Oops.

Missing the secret, important stuff

Being unemployed means having to fill in lots of forms and notify lots of people and offices about your status and needs. I think everything’s now put to bed and copacetic and stowed away safely, cap’n. But I keep thinking it’s not, that I’ve missed something vital, and it’s going to rear up and tear off my head. Metaphorically speaking.

I often feel this way about the various obligations, duties, processes, and procedures that life subjects us to. Part of that is because I have a bad memory and I do indeed tend to forget important steps. But I just realized that it’s deeper than that.

As a semi-deaf and severely nearsighted kid, without either glasses or hearing aids, I always missed important things in school. I sat at my desk lost in my own world, neither seeing what the teacher was writing on the blackboard nor hearing what teach was saying. Which was fine with me, but I’d show up without homework assignments that I didn’t know had been assigned, and when called on in class I’d either ignore the caller or would have no idea what the subject under discussion was. Other kids looked at me as though I were crazy. Teachers assumed I was stupid or disobedient or both. This probably has a lot to do with why I disliked school so much.

It probably contributed to my habit of losing myself in escapist fiction, and later writing it. It also probably explains why themes of secret, important stuff happening in the background, beyond the ken of characters who are endangered by their not knowing, crop up so often in my fiction.

Maybe that’s also why I got hooked on Philip K. Dick from the first novel of his I read.

He was asking for it

Here's a thought experiment.

A man, smaller than average, less strong than average, walks down a street in the evening in a dangerous part of town. He's dressed in an expensive suit, wearing rings, Rolex showing, and he's counting a big wad of money. He is attacked, robbed of everything but his underpants, beaten severely, wakes up in the hospital, or doesn't wake up at all.

Surely no one will say that his attacker had the right to do what he did. And surely no one will say that the victim had it coming to him. Or that he was asking for it.

But surely it's proper, even while expressing sympathy for the victim, to condemn him as a damned fool. Surely it's proper to point out that human predators exist and we should be aware of them. That's not excusing the predator. That's self-defense.

(I'd like to observe in passing that many, maybe most, human predators are born, not made. Their daddies should have taught them properly? Oh, hell, their daddies probably tried their damnedest and finally gave up in despair.)

I used this invented example years ago, when I was discussing rape with a friend of mine. Unlike some people in today's blogosphere, she didn't blame all men for the rapes committed by a few. (Although she was the first person I heard express the wacko and sexist contention that all men are obligated to teach all other men how to behave.) She did, however, insist that women should be free to go wherever they want and dress however they want and be safe from attack.

And I agree. Of course they should be. Just as men should be, just as the guy in my example should be free to walk down that street, dressed as he wants, flashing his money. That's the way the world should work. It's just not the way it does work.

Most of us realize that. We start learning it when we're kids.

Well, most of us. Some kids never do. All the way up to adulthood, they expose themselves to the predators. It may be dress, it may be behavior, it may be location, it may be dating bad boys. The result can be tragic.

Pointing out the dangers isn't vindicating the guilty or blaming the victims. It's simply pointing out that we don't live in an ideal world.

Three phrases that stifle dissent

Earlier today, I commented negatively regarding some statements about men in a blog post. One reaction to my comment was that it sounded "dismissive to women". It struck me that that phrase is often used to stifle dissent.

It also occurred to me that, in that respect, it's much like the phrase "insulting to Muslims".

The third phrase, which was used against me by my parents when I was young and disagreed with them about Jewishness or Israel, is "Jewish anti-semite".

The phrases may be completely inapplicable in the particular case. That doesn't matter. What matters is that they can be used as weapons to intimidate someone into shutting up.

What to do in a zombie attack

An instructional video.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=14397670

Fucking rightwing barbarian

Costco's magazine for members recently asked whether income tax should continue to be taken out of unemployment insurance. Some rightwing shit-for-brains heartless turd wrote in this month's magazine that unemployment insurance should be subject to income taxes because:

Accountability - being responsible for your situation - is more of what is needed in our country. Therefore, every possible incentive to getting off unemployment insurance as soon as possible is needed.

Braindead bastard.

DC-NYC, 5/8-5/18

It was a wonderful trip, despite the memories being slightly poisoned by what happened when we got back.

We flew to Baltimore on the 8th, picked up a rental car, then drove to Bowie, MD, where our granddaughter, Emily, lives and where we had a motel room reserved.

We spent the first weekend with Emily and felt that we bonded with her in a significant way. It was a delightful time. On Friday evening, after we arrived, we took her out to eat and talked endlessly. She loves the Baltimore Inner Harbor and the aquarium there, so we spent Saturday up there. Lots of walking around in the heat and humidity, but it was a happy time anyway. We ate dinner at the Rusty Scupper, a high-end restaurant on the Inner Harbor; she likes the place, and at the time we weren't worried about money, fortunately. (Had I known what was coming, the vacation would have been less happy.) On Sunday, the three of us went to see the new Star Trek movie. Leonore and I liked it quite a bit. Emily loved it. She said it was the best movie she'd ever seen. When I was 15, I would have agreed. Then we took her to dinner at a restaurant and talked much more. Really, it was a marvelous time for us, and Emily seemed to enjoy it greatly too.

We hope so much that she'll come out here to visit Daniel and us. Unfortunately, the idea of traveling this far without her family seems to unnerve her. We'll just mention it from time to time, avoiding pressure, and hope that eventually she'll give it a try.

After that, we drove to Leesburg, VA to spend a few days with Bob and Virginia, friends who used to live in Denver. They have an enormous house in a new development outside Leesburg. There are sprawling developments there, bedroom suburbs for DC. I'm sure it was much more charming 100 years ago, but it was beautiful to us because of the astonishing greenery and lushness. We were also in luck with the weather, which was cool and pleasant instead of the heat and humidity we dread. We spent time catching up on old times and, in my case, drinking lots of bourbon, of which Bob is an afficionado. He's enjoying being retired. He said that every day is like Saturday, and every night is like Friday night. Of course, they have that huge house and lots of money, neither of which most retired people have.

They took us into DC to show us how to get to the Metro station, etc. The four of us walked around the Mall and spent a few hours in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I looked at space vehicles that I had worked on in the 60s and 70s but had never actually seen before -- an odd thought. We took photos. I also saw German WWII V1 and V2 rockets, which the Germans fired at me when I was a baby in England. (When I was working at NASA in Houston in the late 60s, I ran into Werhner von Braun. I wanted to jump up and down in front of him and say, "You missed me!" But I didn't.)

The next day, Leonore and I went back to DC and the Mall by ourselves and walked for hundreds of miles. We didn't go into the museums but instead walked down the Mall, past the Washington Monument, along the tidal basin (missed the cherry blossoms by a couple of weeks), into the Jefferson Memorial (one of my favorite presidents), on to the Lincoln Memorial, then back. We had intended to include the White House, but Leonore was exhausted by that point, so we skipped it. Ate some food and then took the Metro back.

I loved downtown Washington. I had expected it to be cold and sterile, acres of marble. Instead it seemed warm and friendly. The good weather probably helped. I'd love to go back, but I suppose it would be best to avoid the middle of summer or winter.

Then we went to Bethesda and had a fine time with my old college roommate, whom I hadn't seen since about 1965. He's aged, of course, but he talks and laughs and stands the same way as long ago. We both liked his wife very much. It was a very nice visit, and I hope we'll have a chance to see them again soon. They didn't seem inclined to head west, so it will probably have to be there again. I'm so glad we were able to do that.

Then we drove to NYC to stay with Lisa, Leonore's dorm mate from Indiana U, and her husband, Andrew. We didn't go into Manhattan this time. (We did last year, when we visited Lisa and Andrew.) Instead we spent one day at the NY Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo, followed by dinner in the Bronx's Little Italy section. At the Gardens, we met up with another old college friend of Leonore's, whom we hadn't seen in 45 years or thereabouts. That was a nice surprise. The next day, we went to The Cloisters. Both days, it was chilly and rainy, which Leonore and I loved. The natives bitched about it. Everything we saw was lovely. If only all of NYC were like that. The drive to La Guardia on Monday morning, through rush-hour traffic, was a fucking nightmare.

Thanks to the two-hour time difference, we got home about 2 p.m., so I was able to do the weekly grocery shopping and get ready for the next day at a leisurely pace. Then I went to work on Tuesday and got laid off.

Gilbert and Sullivan

Where are you, now that we need you? *

We are the justices of the court supreme
Whose decisions often make you scream.

Gilbert would have known what should come next.




* Dead

David's Definitions for July 2009

Ineluctable

Unavoidable, inevitable. This rare word tends to be used to refer to major things, such as an ineluctable fate. A related word of opposite meaning, even more rare, is eluctate, meaning to struggle your way out from something. If you're taking an English literature class in college, you might discover that the novel Ulysses by James Joyce is ineluctable. In that book, the third chapter begins with the sentence: "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes." You might want to switch majors.


(Will be published in the July 2009 issue of Denver's Community News.)

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

Laid off!

At 11 a.m. this morning. Right after we decided it was safe to spend lots of money on the house, etc.

I was hoping I'd finally found a place I could stay till retirement and not have to go through this shit again. Grump.

Oh, no, the Mormons posthumously converted my Holocaust-victim grandmother!

They probably did, since they've been doing that to Holocaust victims. And others, including, we now learn, Obama's mother. And they've been doing it secretly. Lying about it to the world. Bunch of slimeballs.

Rather, that's what they think they've done. What they've actually been doing is performing a silly, religious - oops, that's redundant! - ritual based on their particular set of fairy tales.

Speaking as an (angry! aggressive!) atheist, the religious rituals performed by Mormons mean as little to me as the religious rituals performed by undiscovered tribes deep in the Amazon rainforest or by Martians, if there are any Martians and if they perform religious rituals. Fairy tales are fairy tales. My grandmother and other members of the family died at the hands of madmen about 70 years ago; that was the tragedy and the crime, and nothing the Mormons do now has any effect on her.

The sleaziness is despicable, but that's about it. Beyond that, you can only get upset if you believe in the fairy tales.

Texting While Driving Can Be Deadly, Study Shows

Mainly, I liked that headline.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090504094434.htm

Making fun of muscles

Damn, this annoys me.

In a review in Slate of the movie Wolverine, Dana Stevens smirks as follows: "The first time Jackman appeared shirtless, about 15 minutes into the movie, his absurdly pneumatic chest garnered one of the few laughs at the screening that I attended."

Pneumatic: "Having a well-proportioned feminine figure; especially: having a full bust."

That's the first part of the standard sneer at muscles - implying that they're somehow feminine, not really masculine at all.

The second part is the implication that a muscular male physique is inherently laughable and contemptible. Among a certain subset of the American population, this is a commonplace. For those people, the presence muscles is assumed to prove the absence of brains.

Jackman's developed chest is not absurd. First, it fits with the cartoon character he's playing. Second, to those of us who lift weights, it denotes the hours of hard work the actor underwent and his admirable self-discipline. What's absurd is Dana Stevens and her ilk. Perhaps she needs to spend a few hours in the gym.

Intelligent Design Sort

It's enough to make a theist out of you!

http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/intelligentdesignsort.html

Orson Scott Card goes even further

around the bend.

Atheist art

Of the in-your-face variety, which I think the world needs more of:

http://www.atheiart.com/

Update on pregnant woman hit by car while running from bear

Mother and child are fine. She says that, in honor of the euthanized bear, she's going to give her kid the middle name Bear.

Really.

Another Chance at Life: A Breast Cancer Survivor's Journey

Leonore's book is now available online.

At Barnes & Noble, both the hardcover and trade paperback have shown up.

At Amazon, so far only the trade paperback is listed.

Oh, God, I love Belgian blondes!

I'm talking about beers.

My First Dictionary

It's an extremely clever and funny blog.

David's Definitions for June 2007

Bellwether

(Will appear in the June 2009 issue of Community News)

Something that indicates a trend or leads the way. For example, in an election, people pay attention to certain states that they feel indicate how the country as a whole will go. Those states are bellwethers for the election. You'll sometimes see this word misspelled bellweather. Perhaps some people think that it has to do with a bell that warns of bad weather. Nope. In old English usage, a castrated ram was called a wether. English farmers would put a bell around the neck of a wether and let it lead a flock of sheep. That way, a farmer could find his sheep by following the sound of the bell on the neck of the bellwether. I suppose no farmer in his right mind would try to put a bell around the neck of an uncastrated ram.




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

Pregnant woman running from bear hit by car

Really. It's an actual story in today's Denver Post.

And it was a hit and run, to boot.

We may be able to breed with aliens!

That's one implication of this article, anyway.

Woo hoo! Let's get working on that warp drive/hyperdrive/makeupanameforit right away, you scientist guys!

Of course, we'll have to be able to fit together properly. That could be difficult. Then there's the likely difference in body chemistry. Oh, quibble, quibble, quibble.