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!