Sentential Links

Links....

:: It is an icky story. And I can’t help wonder if 30 black and/or Hispanic kids had broken into someone’s house if there would be as much “kids will be kids” reaction among some.

:: Will bringing it all back somehow allow me to let go of the past? (This is quite a question. I do not know. This blog belongs to one of my favorite Instagrammers, by the way. Instagram is a lot of fun!)

:: The phrase "Where's my jet pack?" has become an American idiom of late. It reflects the disappointment in the mid-century Utopian promises of technology. Walt Disney was among the top perpetrators of the hype. His forays into documentaries and comic books featured glowing predictions for scientific progress which seem overly optimistic from the vantage point of 2013. (Have you ever 'ridden' the Carousel of Progress at Disneyworld? There's perhaps no better illustration of this philosophy in action than that attraction.)

That being said, a bit of blind faith in the wonders of technology is a healthy thing. As we stand and watch NASA defunded and a super-collider shut down, we lose a little hope. We lose a little enthusiasm for what tomorrow brings.

:: But you wanna talk about something that looks good on a resume? Emmy winner is right up there with “former Prince of Liechtenstein.”

:: Can I sit on a manuscript for a month before I hack at it? Well, no. But I can wait a few days, and that my friends, is pretty darn amazing. (I'm waiting three months. And it's killing me.)

:: Books- A journey disguised as a small paper filled with wonderful words. A time capsule. A portal of wonderment.

More next week!

Louis C.K. is full of crap.

You know how Germans always have the best words? The nice long words that they seem to make up on the spot, words specifically tailored to capture a hyper-specific feeling? I wonder if they have one yet for "That feeling I get when I encounter something that everybody thinks is brilliant but which I think is full of shit." Case in point: comedian Louis C.K.'s almost instantly-legendary rant against smartphones. This thing lit up the Internet over the weekend; everybody was linking it, and one person I know cited that in her epiphanic decision to downgrade from an iPhone to a dumbphone. But when I heard the rant, I thought, "That guy is ridiculously full of crap".

And I say that as someone who (a) has enjoyed Louis C.K.'s work in the past, and (b) who does not own a smartphone. So I don't exactly have a dog in this fight, and in some ways, I'm a bit sympathetic. I've noticed that people spend an awful lot of time staring at their phones, absolutely. But are they really? Is that an accurate snapshot? As I write this, I'm sitting in Panera Bread. The dining room is mostly full; families, couples, and single parties abound. And off all the people in this room right now, guess how many people are looking at a glowing screen? Exactly one. Me. And I'm writing.

And you know what else? It's not hurting my engagement with the world. I'm not shutting things out. A little girl at the table next to mine knocked over her drink, and I noticed enough to pass over a few extra napkins I had. I see another girl, an employee on break, using her smartphone. She's not staring at it as she texts, though. She's talking into it. Like a phone. While she does her homework, with a pencil.

When I see lots of folks looking at their phones, what are they doing? Are they really staring at it for long lengths of time? Stopping to think of it, I have to admit...not really. Most take them out, glance at them, and if they do anything at all, it's to tap out a quick text and then put the thing away. Yes, I have seen folks who take it too far. I've seen guys who go into the restroom and text away with one hand while they use their other to...well, handle administrative details pertaining to urinal usage. (Ahem.) I'll be blunt here: I ever find out that anyone texts me from the bathroom, I'm blocking their number. Or something.

Frankly, what I see people do the most with their smartphones is keep them in their back pockets, pulled up just far enough so that one corner sticks out, visible. Phone as fashion accessory. Well, why not? That's why we have expensive wristwatches, and I remember an outfit from which I bought fountain pens back in the day marketing them as "jewelry for men".

But back to Louis C.K.'s rant, which strikes me as just another version of the "Isn't it awful what the kids are doing these days" thing, albeit more poetically delivered. But much of it is deeply, deeply misguided and/or silly. And that's after it starts off with him saying something that stopped me in my tracks and made me actively hostile to whatever else was to come in his argument.

I think these things are toxic, especially for kids...they don't look at people when they talk to them and they don't build empathy. You know, kids are mean, and it's 'cause they're trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, 'you're fat,' and then they see the kid's face scrunch up and they go, 'oh, that doesn't feel good to make a person do that.' But they got to start with doing the mean thing. But when they write 'you're fat,' then they just go, 'mmm, that was fun, I like that.'

Now, let's break that down a little bit. To start with, "Kids don't look people in the eye when they talk" is not a new complaint. Not by any stretch of imagination. I heard that all the time when I was a kid, and that was in the 1970s and 1980s. "Look at me when I'm talking to you!" is an admonition that is as old as the hills, predating cell-phone use by...well, I'll bet they were saying this in Ancient Egypt.

But then there's the bit about kids "experimenting" with being mean, and his notion that when they see how much it hurts a kid's feelings when they call them fat, they'll realize they don't feel good or something.

Bullshit.

I have to wonder if LouisCK ever actually knew any other kids, or if he ever saw any bullies at work, because I remember being a kid, and I remember that even as the kid who was often on the receiving end of the bullying, if I managed to say something to someone else and saw hurt in their eyes, I wasn't thinking, "Oooh, that didn't feel good." What I actually felt was, "Ooooh, that hurt him! I've got me a weapon!" And remember, I was the fat kid getting picked on a lot. How do you think the normal kids responded? Or the actual bullies? Seeing the hurt in someone's eye when you say "You're fat" is, for a kid, not a bug. It's a feature. The actual reaction is, "Now we got ourselves a show."

LouisCK is completely full of crap on this point, totally and utterly. It's not a good start. But he keeps going:

You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it's all for nothing and that you're alone. It's down there.

And sometimes when things clear away, you're not watching anything, you're in your car, and you start going, 'oh no, here it comes. That I'm alone.' It's starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it...

That's why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they're killing, everybody's murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don't want to be alone for a second because it's so hard.

No. No, no, no, no, no.

First of all: why do we need this ability to just sit and do nothing? What's so great about sitting and doing nothing? Where's the virtue in that? And how is it desirable? Standing in line at the DMV, waiting at a doctor's office, whatever – are we supposed to lament the fact that we've somehow lost the 'Zen' of such things? Well, I'm not sure there was ever that much 'Zen' there to begin with. Standing in line, just being there, just being "a person"...was boring. It was a waste of time. Now, I'm a bit less prone to boredom in such circumstances because I can always kick my Writing Brain into gear and start working internally on some stories. But I do that anyway, and I suspect a lot of people do, too.

More importantly, though, how is that being "a real person"? This seems to me just another example of the notion that online interactions aren't real, that only physical world interactions are worth anything at all. I've long rejected this notion. You know what? If and when I become a published author, it will be with the help of an awful lot of people I've never met. Real people.

Which is why I think the rest of LouisCK's bit here is just a bunch of goofy existential twaddle. Ultimately we're alone? Meh, not really. And we're using our phones as a way of pushing away that loneliness? Meh, not really. People aren't texting and driving because they're afraid of being alone. They're doing it because they aren't rationally and realistically appraising their abilities to do two tasks at the same time, both of which are complex tasks that only seem simple. There's no need to appeal to Sartre here. People text and drive not because they're trying to push away the intrinsic loneliness of life. They text and drive because they are idiots.

And then he tops it off with some more stupidity:

And I go, 'oh, I'm getting sad, gotta get the phone and write "hi" to like 50 people'...then I said, 'you know what, don't. Just be sad. Just let the sadness, stand in the way of it, and let it hit you like a truck.'

And I let it come, and I just started to feel 'oh my God,'and I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch. I cried so much. And it was beautiful. Sadness is poetic. You're lucky to live sad moments.

And then I had happy feelings. Because when you let yourself feel sad, your body has antibodies, it has happiness that comes rushing in to meet the sadness. So I was grateful to feel sad, and then I met it with true, profound happiness. It was such a trip.

The thing is, because we don't want that first bit of sad, we push it away with a little phone or a jack-off or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die. So that's why I don't want to get a phone for my kids.

Again: No. No, no, no, no, no.

This is another sentiment that's been around forever: that people aren't allowing themselves to really feel what they feel, that they avoid high flights of emotion, et cetera. Again, we don't need to drag smartphones into this at all: many people are uncomfortable with those high flights of emotion. LouisCK is doing nothing more than taking old complaints and using them as a cudgel against something he doesn't like, all by itself.

And besides, who is posting or tweeting or texting everything? Really, who is doing this? There are people who post more than we would, but that's no the same thing as posting everything. This distinction seems lost on Louis, but even if not, so what? If someone posts that a certain song made them feel a certain intense feeling or set of feelings, you know what? I frakking love that. I do. I think it's awesome. If someone shares with me something that gives them a feeling of some kind of passionate level, that's great. It gives me an insight into them, and it helps me to find things that may create similar feelings in myself.

Sharing is not bad. I like sharing. I don't share everything. Some folks share more. Others share less. And I know people who share a lot more than I would ever feel comfortable sharing, but that is, again, not a bug but rather a feature, because that's the only way I ever get to know what is to feel certain things. When we complain about "Those people sharing everything on Facebook!", it seems to me that what we're really complaining about is "Those people who are sharing an awful lot of stuff on Facebook that I do not personally find interesting!" Which is, of course, a different thing entirely.

We are obviously more connected now than ever before. But I am not one bit convinced that this means we are more distracted now than ever before. Believe me, I have always had great ways of wasting time. In fact, I remember teachers occasionally castigating me for daydreaming. Which means I was just doing the simple act of sitting there, doing nothing, staring into space, not much paying attention to anything at all. That's was LouisCK wants back. The wheel does turn, doesn't it?

Finally, I also wonder if part of this isn't born of my general sense – and here I'm mainly talking off the top of my head, with no real well-considered evidence to support it – that, aided by technology, a world which has been long-dominated by extroverted people is starting to tilt in the direction of the introverts, and that is making an awful lot of extroverted people really uncomfortable. But that's a post for another day.

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I've seen a bunch of these before, but even so, they remain ever-fascinating: 31 haunting images of abandoned places. The hotel in Colombia is particularly haunting.

:: A couple of guys decide to go into a couple of restaurants and tip their servers a couple hundred bucks. I love this.


More next week!

It's all in the details.

I have a half-arsed theory that one thing that makes stories work, be they in book form or movies or teevee shows, is in the little details they include. It's not the "details" as in the various plot points and making sure they work, or things like avoiding anachronisms.

(Say, you know what anachronism always bothers me when I see it? People in movies or teevee shows drinking Coke from glass bottles. You can still get glass bottles today, so it's easy, right? You just buy those and film away. Problem is, those are 8oz bottles. Back in the day, Coke bottles were 16oz. Those tiny bottles always stick out like a sore thumb to me.)

But anyway, I was thinking a bit about Superman (1978), after watching it a while back, and there's this tiny little thing that happens in one scene. So tiny you wouldn't even notice it, but I think it's just terrific, because it really does add a tiny bit of realism to the film's world.

It's the start of the film's third act. Lex Luthor has reprogrammed the two missiles, and he's about to use his ultra-sonic broadcaster to speak directly to Superman. Clark Kent arrives in the Daily Planet newsroom, as his fellow reporters are clustering around a teevee set to watch the nuclear missile test. Clark comes over, asks what's going on, someone tells him, and then tells him that Perry White wants to see him. Then the guy says, "You're blocking the set, Clark," and Clark says, "Oh, sorry," ducks his head, and walks to Perry White's office.

But before he gets there, he turns back to the reporter he'd just been talking to and says, "Hey, how's Judy?" The guy says "Fine", and Clark says "Great!" or "Good!" or something like that.

The whole interaction lasts all of five seconds, but that last bit -- "Hey, how's Judy?" -- is the kind of perfect detail that makes this film's world seem that much more real. Clark isn't just hanging out at the newspaper for something to do when he's not fighting crime and working for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. It's his job, these are his coworkers. Clark Kent knows this guy's wife's name and asks about her. That's great.

I think what I'm getting at here is that even the most spectacular fantasy worlds are, at some point, mundane. There are people in every single fantasy world who are just going to jobs and asking how the kids are and the like. When writing such details into worlds, you don't have to draw attention to them or underline them or make them stand out. And you certainly don't need tons of them, just a few, here and there. But they work wonders when you realize they're there. It's like the two stormtroopers in Star Wars IV: A New Hope, chatting about stormtrooper stuff while Obi Wan Kenobi turns off the tractor beam. It's the acknowledgment in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring that a party the size of Bilbo Baggins's birthday party is going to involve a lot of dirty dishes.

What examples of such little details -- the mundane little bits of the fictional worlds -- do you recall from favorite books or tales in other media?

"One thing led to another, and I forgot to kill myself that day."

I like this a lot. Mr. Ferguson rambles a bit, as comics are wont to do, but I think I see what he's getting at, and it speaks to my general attitude regarding snark these days.

Hurgle flurp.

This is the kind of week it's been:


Not awful, and nothing serious going awry...just daily grind, bring more grinding than usual; just...frustratingly annoying, and a lot less productive than I would like. Gotta do better! And I will...once I've finished the job of strangling this work week and leaving its decaying remnants buried behind me.

Argghhhhh!

(Stay with me, folks. Better content is on the way!)

Something for Thursday

I'm not a big fan of the movie, but I like Maurice Jarre's music for it, so here is "Keating's Triumph" from Dead Poets Society.

Filling my rocket quota

Antares Rocket With Cygnus Spacecraft Launches, originally uploaded by NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

Here's a nifty rocket launch. Oooh, aaah!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

What's a noted attraction or cool thing within a short drive of your home -- say, an hour or two -- that despite its proximity, you've never been to?

A dirty truth about sports

Pearls Before Swine:

Sentential Links

Linkage, for them what like links....

:: I have a reasonably large vocabulary, I suppose. Some words, particularly newer ones, apparently elude me, however. Twerking and selfie have been added to the Oxford Dictionary of English recently, and I had been largely oblivious to both terms. (I am still unclear as to what exactly 'twerking' is. And no, I am not requesting an explanation.)

:: I need to constantly remind myself that there is no reason anyone should have any idea what I am talking about. My life includes farriers, horse carts, cheese making and medieval archery. It's about fiddles and cider brewing and I make a living talking about it all on the internet.

:: One of the hidden gem moments of the Avengers had to be the conversation between Agent Coulson and Captain America when they first meet face to face. (I'd forgotten that moment. I really need to see that movie again....)

:: There are three topics that one is not supposed to talk about in the wardroom: sex, politics, and religion. We’ve had recent threads about both sex and politics, so it’s time for religion. To that end, here we go.

:: Whatever the case, both those poor souls look like they would be seriously cheered up by a little kid walking in there and cramming more potato chips into his mouth than anyone would’ve though humanly possible.

:: I wish I had more of the analytical, explaining talent. Then I could maybe really communicate to people this feeling, or even explain it better to myself. I know we all experience this kind of thing from time to time, and I'm glad. I think it's one of those things that truly connect us as souls, that truly gives us friendship. But I'm still working on being a good teacher and explainer and analyzer of all these things, rather than just a student and sponge of awesomeness. We're all just doing our best to add to the awesome, right?

Maybe you don't see this feeling as spiritually or important as I do, and that's okay. But it's like the TARDIS says. We humans, we're bigger on the inside.

:: My true self is my baggy overalls self. It’s imperfect. It’s in process. But it’s beloved by God apart from appearance or accomplishment or titles. (Overalls as metaphor for ultimate acceptance? Works for me!)

:: This attitude is nothing new, obviously. There's a strong belief among the Beltway pundit class—even among a lot of liberals—that a true commander-in-chief is someone who is always and everywhere ready to go to war without doubt and without misgivings. Even if the war is wrong, you need to keep up a steely facade.

I sometimes wonder how it is that so few people seem to recognize just how insane this is. Even speaking as someone who thinks Obama handled Syria pretty poorly, I don't have the slightest problem with the fact that he was obviously conflicted about it. He should be conflicted about it. This isn't self-defense. We're not defending democracy. We're not responding to any danger to Americans. It's a close call. And it would be something like our eighth—or tenth, or twelfth, depending on how you count—overseas military action in the past two decades. What kind of person doesn't look at a record like this and at least consider the possibility that a full-bore bloody shirt campaign by the president might not be in order yet again? (I can't stand the constant drum-beating for war. I find it unbelievably depressing, each and every time it happens. I am more and more convinced that it is simply chest-beating at a national level. I, for one, would be very happy to never, ever, ever hear again the foreign policy thoughts of Senator John "I love war!" McCain.)

More next week!

How I feel when the entire Internet goes into "OMG BREAKING BAD" mode. Yeesh.

How I feel when the entire Internet goes into "OMG BREAKING BAD" mode. Yeesh., originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

So a week or two ago I watched the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, figuring to finally catch up a bit on what is apparently, to judge by online reaction, the single greatest Artistic Endeavour in the history of the television medium. (And that isn't remotely hyperbole on my part -- that is an accurate summation of opinion.) My reaction? I didn't like the episode, so I decided not to bother with the rest of the series. (Please don't try to talk me into going back into it. I'm really not interested.)

Now, this goes into my general sense of ennui with pop culture's current (and, to my way of thinking, disturbingly ascendant) fascination with villains and antiheroes -- what I've come to think of as Awful People At Work And Play. But I'm also interested in this whole phenomenon of binge-watching teevee series. I see people online talk about watching an entire season of some show or other over a day or two, and my mind reels -- after one or two episodes of something, I'm ready for something else. Even things that I really, really like, such as Battlestar Galactica or Arrested Development (which The Wife and I are watching now). I find that I am simply not wired for binge-watching.

I also discover that a common argument for teevee series is, "Well, you gotta give it five or six episodes before it hits its stride." And that is true, to an extent -- but when confronted with an entire series on DVD or streaming, my eyes glaze over at the prospect. "I gotta watch six hours of this thing just to know if I like it enough to keep going?" That can't be right.

I'm encouraged by the existence of teevee series that are intended to tell a single story, instead of being open-ended unto an inevitable limp toward cancellation. But by the same token, a lot of such series constitute way too much of a time investment for me. With movies and teevee, I don't get to control my rate of experiencing the narrative, and in any event, a teevee series is really built around a weekly schedule. Binge-watching just doesn't feel right to me.

How about you folks? Do you binge-watch teevee series?

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Ever wonder what the sport of parkour looks like to those actually doing the...umm...parkouring? Wonder no more:


(This video may be triggery in people with problems with vertigo. Or people who just don't much like the idea of plummeting great distances to injury.)

:: Never let it be said you can't keep a good idea down! Sure, a disaster involving an enormous fireball and a number of deaths can be a setback, for decades even, but eventually we were bound to get back to the airship, weren't we? I would love to see these in the sky!

:: It kind of bothers me that I remember each and every one of these.

More next week!

Holding Pattern Delta!

Just a brief post to allay any fears that I've forgotten about finishing up the queries from Ask Me Anything! August 2013. I've had a busy week, but it's almost over, so that work will get done, I promise!

Meantime, here's some nifty science fiction music for you. This is from the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series, but it's a wonderful musical nod to the show's first incarnation, in 1978. The famed brassy main theme from Version I was repurposed for the reboot series as the "National Anthem" for the Colonials. And this treatment is terrific!

Something for Thursday

I suddenly felt in the mood for some Mozart, so here's some Mozart: his Symphone #41 in C Major, sometimes called the "Jupiter" Symphony. If Mozart had only written one twentieth of the music he wrote, and this symphony was one of them, he would still be considered one of the greats.


Note to self: Watch Amadeus with the kid. She's as old now as I was when it came out.

The City of Dead Works (a repost)

I wrote this not long after the awful events of 9-11-01, and I repost it every year on that date, marking the time as one of America's worst days makes its inevitable transition from Memory into History.

"The City of Dead Works"

There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.

I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. "Come aboard," I say. "I will take your coin for passage." One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.

When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.

This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.

"Please," a young man says as he turns to me, "I have to go home to my daughters."

"You are going home now," I reply. "To the home where all eventually return." Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.

"This can’t be," a woman cries out. "My mother needs me."

"She will be with you soon enough."

"When?" Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.

"I cannot say," I reply. "The Ferryman has no hand in Fate."

The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.

"Where will you take us?" someone asks.

"To the place you are promised," I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.

We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. "What is that?" he asks.

"It is the City of Dead Works," I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.

"I don’t understand," someone else says. "The City of Dead Works?"

"Aye," I reply. "Behold!"

From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.

"That one looks Egyptian," a woman says.

"The Great Library of Alexandria," I tell her. "Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead."

A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.

"The Temple of Solomon," I say.

"There are ships in the harbor," says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.

"I don’t understand," a young man says. "Why this City? Why here?"

I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.

Almost.

Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.

"Who lives in that city?" It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.

"No one lives there," I tell him. "The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires."

The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.

"We will be there soon," I say. "Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold." No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.

But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.

I know these things.

I am the Ferryman of the Dead.

Finis.

The truth is out there....

The X-Files debuted twenty years ago tonight. Wow.

I need to get back to my long-stalled rewatch, don't I?

Sentential Links

Linkage!

:: I write because I love it. I create the best art I possibly can because I’m passionate about it. I obsess over word choice and plotlines and character development because I won’t give you anything less than my best. And I share my work with you – for free – because I’ve seen how quickly a person’s dreams can be shattered. I would rather give you my art, without asking for anything in return, than come to the end of my life with unrealized dreams. I just can’t wait any longer. (I saw this post linked on Twitter today, and it really hit me. I'm not desperate to have a paid career writing, although that is my dream and my goal. But, like I indicated last week, I also deeply love and believe in the stories I am creating, so much so that my real dream is to be read. I'm not sure I'll give it away for free, but who knows -- if I can't publish, and if for some reason I can't self-publish, then I'll just give it to the world. Worse things have been done.)

:: For now, I just need to... well, I was going to say get through the next day and a half. But I really don't want to just get through them. I want to experience them. (SamuraiFrog continues his brave struggles with anxiety. I really think that people writing and blogging about these things can only help...even if it's to help others who don't suffer be more empathetic. Nothing's worse than the "Stiff upper lip, just choose to be happy!" crowd.)

:: Nothing is more fun than the all-true, guaranteed to be correct information features on the inside covers of crime comics.

:: It’s nuts when you think about it. We very briefly had a neverending rainbow of home cinema, the largest film selection available to any generation ever, period, end of story, and we’re regressing from that. How depressing is that?

:: A.C. Crispin will be missed for her vigilant devotion to sticking up for writers, her wonderful candor, her thoughtful and exciting writing, and most of all, for giving the fans of various fictional worlds sweet and unforgettable gifts.

Thanks, Ann Crispin. You’ll be missed. (I hope the fact that Crispin was probably best known for her media tie-in work won't hold back her reputation in the future. She really was a terrific storyteller, and she could find things in established universes that were so good, so true, that it's hard not to consider her additions 'canon'. She will be missed.)

More next week.

Hmmmmm....

There's no earthly way of knowing...where this friggin' book is going.... #AmWriting, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

GhostCop (not the actual title) is going in fits and starts. I'm having trouble building up a sense of momentum on this one. I do suspect this book will be quite a bit shorter than either of the two Princesses In SPACE!!! books, both of which hit right around 180,000 words in their first drafts. This one looks to be leaner, maybe about 120,000 words.

Anyway, that's where things stand right now in the WritingVerse. Back we go! Zap! Pow!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Glenn Beck's psychodelic road show. I actually kinda want to see this, just for how gonzo it sounds.

:: Need a reaction GIF from a Hayao Miyazaki movie, tailored to a specific emotion? Here you go.

:: Lots of weird stuff in the Amazon. It's all probably hostile, so hey, Brazil? Could you bulldoze the rest of the Amazon faster, please? Thanks!

:: Finally, a salute to a typewriter repairman who died last month at the age of 96, working almost to the end. I used to dink around on a typewriter a lot as a kid, and I imagine typewriter repair was a nice niche field to be in for quite a few decades, there.

More next week!

Mr Pastis will take your lunch money now.

The last two days, Pearls Before Swine (one of my favorite newspaper comic strips) ran these two installments:

They're OK, not all that funny, really. But these characters -- the polar bear and the penguins -- have never been seen before. Since Pearls often abounds in meta-style humor and the breaking of the fourth wall (creator Stephan Pastis often includes himself as one of his own characters, with the characters commenting on the quality of his work), I figured that something was up. Meanwhile, each day, there were people in the comments section offering the complaint that "Polar bears are Arctic beasts, while penguins are Antarctic." Which is true.

But then, today Pastis pulls this:

Heh. The last two days were mere set-up for this, which wouldn't have worked if the comments sections and message boards didn't do exactly what he figured they'd do when he drew these strips months ago.

Well played, Stephan Pastis! Well played, indeed!

Something for Thursday

I've come to like this band a great deal. Here are Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, in a lovely song about unrequited love: "Someday".

Anybody got a sports page?

From 40 Behind the Scenes Photos from Classic Horror Movies, which is exactly what it says. Really nifty stuff, and even though I don't like the movie, this one's my favorite:

I just love that he's just sitting there, waiting for whatever.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

First day of school, when you were a kid: "Oh cool, this again!" or "This again? Kill me now."?

Some Lazy Linkage!

Just a few links to some nifty stuff seen 'round Blogistan of late:

:: Cal reports on a saloon in the Yukon that serves a cocktail with a pretty odd addition. No cocktail olive or Maraschino cherry up there, nosiree, Bob....

:: SamuraiFrog has been blogging off-and-on, and pretty bravely in my view, about his struggles with anxiety and depression. We do not, as a society, tend to appreciate nearly as much the degree to which such things are a major struggle for those who suffer them, and the degree to which they can turn what non-sufferers see as normal events into harrowing ordeals. Here's his latest report on this. As always, I wish him the best in conquering these particular demons.

:: Roger reports on attending a taping of an NPR radio show. The show is Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!, a quiz show with a live studio audience.

:: Ken Levine on being asked to do an improv scene...with Robin Williams.

:: John Scalzi went to Worldcon, and brought himself back some hardware. I'm not a big fan of the book he won the Hugo for, but as I've indicated elsewhere, it's not a function of his writing but rather that it's just not my cup of tea (being "meta-fiction" and all). But still, congratulations to him. He's having a terrific career, and it's interesting to recall that I first got wind of him a little over ten years ago, when a story circulated Blogistan of some blogger who had stuck his book online and then had a publisher pick it up. Now he's winning Hugos. (Should the plural of Hugo be Hugi?)

:: Help a clown to deliver a pie to his 1000th face. I'm on board with this, obviously!

Ooooh, football season!

I usually make some kind of quasi-official (read: half-assed) prediction of how the Buffalo Bills will do each season, so here it is, even though I'm not returning to blogging about each individual game. My new rule, as stated a week or so ago, is that I won't watch any more Bills games until the team reaches four games over .500. If that takes them until the 2015 season, so be it. Watching what will almost certainly be bad football doesn't strike me as a good use of my beloved autumn and winter weekend hours, so there they go.

But anyway: the Bills are going with a youth movement. They have a new rookie quarterback, whom they took in the first round this past year: EJ Manuel, who was off most scouts' radar for some reason. From what I've read, I'm not sure why that is, but then, I'm not a scout. He seems to be an intelligent player who works hard and who played quite a bit in college. Works for me. We'll see what happens. Other than that, the Bills pretty much stink everywhere else except running back. And maybe the offensive line.

It's a year for youth, so I expect lumps a-plenty. My best guess for their final record is 4-12. Yippee. Go team, rah rah rah, if you can't do it, the other team can!

Caillou in Inappropriate Places

Here's an awful thing that popped into my head one day that I couldn't resist: using Photofiltre to insert Caillou, everybody's least-favorite four-year-old, into terrible scenes from history. I've been doing this on Tumblr, and here are the ones I've done so far, below the jump (because this is really in bad taste)!

Sentential Links

It's that time again....

:: Clearly Someone Didn't Want The Saxophone To Be Invented (Wow. Just...wow.)

:: In my career, I’ve been on the other side numerous times. I’ve been the one reading and judging. I always write nice rejection letters, even if the script sucks eggs. I feel that good, bad, or indifferent, the person (or team) went to the effort of writing a script and the least I could do is let them down easy.

Plus, who’s to say I’m always right? I’m not. Along the way, I’ve rejected a few great people who went on to long and successful careers. When a writer friend of mine was story editor on ARCHIE BUNKER’S PLACE he rejected a script by the Coen Brothers. It happens to all of us.

So when you get rejected – and we all do – take heart. You never know who’s going to turn out to be an A-lister. (You know, no matter how many pieces like this I read, my reaction to a new rejection is always the same. It's a mixture of "Oh who the HELL am I kidding I'm an untalented WRETCH who should apologize to all these people for inflicting my work upon them!" and "I will etch your names on a wall of granite, such that they will remain for all time a testament to the FOOLISHNESS of turning ME away! ONE DAY I WILL FEAST UPON YOUR SOULS AND THOSE OF YOUR NEXT SEVEN GENERATIONS!!!!". Luckily, these two feelings pass pretty quickly, and then I'm onto the much more reasonable and practical "OK, who's next?".)

:: I believe that to read like a writer, the best way is to read a piece of literature as if you were going to teach it. (Interesting approach. I tend to read like a fellow storyteller.)

:: As a Doctor Who fan, one of the most frustrating things is the inability to watch a complete run of the series. 106 episodes of the series - one-in-eight of the total number - are missing from the BBC archives.

:: I was just wondering… Is there any kind of protocol for ending a texting conversation? (I wonder about this myself. It's kind of like discussions on blog comment threads, which inevitably just kind of peter out as the post drops down the front page. It reminds me of something someone said back in the hey-day of political blogging: If you touch off a controversy and invite lots of traffic and bile on something you write, just keep posting. The post in question will drop farther and farther down until it vanishes into the Archives, and it'll be forgotten. Not quite about text messaging, but conversations in texts just seem to stop, don't they?)

:: Don’t you people get it? There’s only one way out of autumn. No matter how nice it seems, it always dumps you right in front of that spooky shed out back where you must sit inside on the dirt with your knees pressed against your chin while blowing into your hands for three months. Watching your breath quickly appear and disappear like memories of basking on the beach under golden light the summer before. (Old post, but the author linked it on Twitter yesterday. He's a fine writer, which is a shame because he's SO SO SO wrong! I adore Fall and Winter! Come, cool weather and snow! Huzzah!!! Check out his site, by the way. Lots of interesting and well-written stuff there.)

:: When President Obama suggested that we look at race again in light of the Trayvon Martin case, that Obama could have been Trayvon 35 years ago, some, such as Touré at TIME, thought it was a brave personal observation. He wrote: “The assertion that blacks are hallucinating or excuse-making or lying when we talk about the many very real ways white privilege and racial bias and the lingering impact of history impact our lives is painful. It adds insult to injury to attack all assertions of racism and deny its continued impact or existence.”

More next week!

Answers, the seventh!

Continuing the answers!

Andy asked: Have you ever thought about self publishing your novel and bypassing all the rejections the clowns at the publishing companies give ya??????

Oh, yes, I have indeed. And yes, I will self-publish...but only when I am satisfied that it's just not going to happen the traditional route.

Self-publishing has been around forever, but technology is really driving it into acceptability nowadays, which is a very fascinating development. The growth of new paths around the traditional gatekeepers may become one of the most important developments in the literary history of this century. So, what are my thoughts about it?

Well, first off, I want to go the traditional route, if I can. The reason is that the infrastructure already exists, and there are people – agents, editors – who help you navigate that infrastructure. Marketing, book design, all those kinds of things are already in place, so all the writer has to do is write. (I know, this is an oversimplification, but we're just riffing in a blog post here.) I'm not sure how good I'd be at the whole marketing area, for example, but if the time comes, I'll get myself up to speed pretty quickly.

However, the plain likelihood is that Princesses In SPACE!!! isn't going to sell, for various reasons. The odds are just against it. I'm an unpublished author, so the bar gets set even higher; the book is on the long side, at roughly 160,000 words. (In ballpark terms, that's a roughly 400 to 450 page mass-market paperback novel.) Now, I'm biased, but I think that I wrote a book that moves those pages along pretty quickly, but still – newbie authors don't often get to break in with long books. It does happen, though – witness Patrick Rothfuss and his doorstop debut, The Name of the Wind. (Not that I'm comparing myself to Patrick Rothfuss.)

Used to be that a new writer would write a book, shop it around, and if it didn't sell, well, that was just one of every author's "practice novels", their training camp, so to speak. The idea is that every writer has to produce a few clunkers just to learn what it is they're doing, so that when they do break through, it's with a book that's as good as they can make it. With the rise of Indie publishing, that's not so much the case anymore.

Is this a good thing? Don't we need the gatekeepers to keep the marketplace from filling up with crap?

Well, maybe...but then, I'm not entirely sure. It seems to me that gatekeeping may take a different form, and the literary community may become something like, oh, Trip Advisor or Urban Spoon or some of those sites. My mother has become quite a traveler in recent years, and she relies heavily on Trip Advisor to find out things like where to stay and eat, what to do and how to do it, how to get around, and that sort of thing. A restaurant in a town that gets terrible reviews on Trip Advisor is at a substantial disadvantage, and the same may apply in the future to writers who put poor books into the marketplace. And besides, let's be honest: it's not as if the gatekeepers aren't an impenetrable bulwark against the tides of crap. Lots of crap gets through, for various reasons: one person doesn't think it's crap, or their crap detector malfunctions at a key point, or that crap is what's selling so they'd better get some of their own similarly-scented crap out there on the shelves, too. Who knows. I return to William Goldman's statement, which I think should be known as Goldman's Law: "Nobody knows anything".

So, yes, I will self-publish Princesses In SPACE!!! when the time comes. I suspect that won't be for at least another year, if not longer, which kind of frustrates me, because I really want this story to be out there as soon as possible. I want people reading it and hopefully liking it and telling other people that they like it and so on...but the wheels of publishing turn slowly, and I don't want to jump the gun. Maybe I just haven't put the book in front of the right agent yet; you never know, and there are a LOT of fish in that particular sea.

There is one benefit to waiting that long, though. My current plan is to edit the first draft of Princesses II in December and get it to beta readers no later than the Super Bowl, which means that I'd be able to generate a third draft sometime next spring or early summer; by next fall, I hope to be writing Princesses III: The World Crime League (not the actual title). The upshot here is that, if I end up self-publishing, I should be able to – at least as the series starts – issue one novel per year in the Princesses In SPACE!!! Saga. If and when I have fans, I don't want to subject them to any George RR Martin-style waits between books!

Ultimately, I'll self-publish when the time comes because while I'm a newbie unknown in the eyes of the publishing world, I'm not a newbie unknown to me. I'm not content to let this be one of my "practice books". I believe in this story, I know it's good, and one way or another, as long as I'm drawing breath, it will get out there.

(Not that anyone asked, but I'm hoping to complete the first draft of GhostCop by December – using its back half as my NaNoWriMo project for this year – and then move back into Lighthouse Boy, a project which is starting to recrystalize a bit in my head.)

OK! Next up, an anonymous reader asked: How did you put together/find the people who review and edit your book?

I had six people beta-read Princesses, and I'll likely go with a similar number for Princesses II. I didn't want a large number of beta readers, so I went for diversity, which really paid off. There was my friend Matt Jones, whom I've known since fifth grade and who has been reading my drivel for exactly that long. (Interestingly, he liked the book least, but that's what I expected, since his literary tastes have developed along lines of terse and economical prose, Hemingway-esque, if you will, while my own tastes run toward long and poetic sentences that have their own rhythm and frequently go on way too long but I don't care because that's how I like it and I enjoy reading sentences like that, sentences you can lose yourself in. Hmmmm.) Only one other is someone I know in real life, a friend from work who reads quite a bit but who doesn't know SF very well. That was important to me, because I'm trying to write a book (or sequence of books) that don't assume a good deal of familiarity with a genre that can be offputting to people entering it. Ditto an online friend who is one of the writers I respect most; she's an experienced writer and spinner-of-tales, but SF ain't her thing, either. The other three are all online friends who are familiar with SF, but whom I know to have different tastes within SF.

Everyone had interesting commentary to offer, from a genre standpoint or from a "Hmmm, the story seems to slow down a bit through this" standpoint, or a "I'm not sure it makes sense for this character to do that right then" standpoint, or from the extremely helpful standpoint of "Hey dummy, you've spelled the same made-up word five different ways. Make up thy mind!"

These folks all have standing invitations to beta-read my stuff in the future, and I may add one or two, but in general I intend to keep that group fairly small. (There were a couple folks I asked who had to decline on the basis that they had too much to read already. Gotta respect the "To read' pile.)

Finally, Roger asks: Your feeling about ebooks v physical books, both from a reading experience and all that complexity of who owns the items when one wants to pass on the book.

There's always been a tough divide to find between physical property and intellectual property. I once knew an artist who sold an original work to someone, who later decided that they didn't want it anymore and put it on eBay. Was that person out of line? I'm not sure, but I can see how it could be viewed as such. Owning books is a pleasure, and I'm less thrilled with the idea of not "owning" anything when I buy something; we're moving toward a model where our money buys us a license to enjoy something, rather than owning it. I'm not wild about that, but I can only shout at the rain for so long, too.

As for the actual reading of e-books versus physical books, I do definitely prefer the physical book. But as a matter of convenience, the e-book is just undeniable. Carrying around a little tablet that is loaded with dozens of books and comics is just too cool for words, and it's a fabulous way to get hold of great literature...with certain concerns. Reading an e-book is, in terms of experiencing the content, pretty much exactly the same as reading a physical book.

There are differences, though. The screens have come far enough that reading on a screen doesn't bother me at all, which is cool. The apps I use all have different ways of navigating, though; my favorite, Perfect Viewer, I use for reading comics, and it advances the page by tapping on the left side of the screen. This seems slightly counterintuitive, but I hold the tablet in my left hand, which means that tapping the left side of the screen requires a simple flick of my left thumb. The Kindle and other e-book apps I use all use a tap on the right side, however. (I find that Kindle's "sweet spot" is easy to miss, too, so I usually just swipe the page to turn.)

Some e-books use too large a font or have too much spacing, so I end up having to swipe quite frequently. Also, there's no physical sense to progressing through the book, which takes some getting used to. You don't get the physical shift in the weight of the book over time, as the weight of flipped pages moves from right to left; you don't get the feel of the book's right-hand side dwindling. All you get is a little page counter at the bottom, or a progress bar, or a number indicating what percentage of the book you've read. That's a bummer – part of the tactile feel of reading a book isn't there. But I don't miss that enough to consider e-book reading a 'lesser' reading experience.

Somewhat more problematic for me is that I like to dip into books I've read, or refer back to passages as I progress through a book. This is much easier in a physical book, where I can roughly recall how far back a given thing I'm looking for is, and I can land on a certain page, jog my memory a bit ("OK, that happened before the bit I'm looking for"), and then act accordingly. With e-books, all you have is that sliding bar at the bottom to move back and forth in the book, so tracking down memorable bits is difficult.

Also, I've noticed that the formatting still hasn't become standardized enough. For the most part, books you buy on the Kindle store are pretty solid, but not always. You can get Kindle editions of classic literature pretty cheaply; many are even free. But you lose something in formatting, which can often be messy or buggy. This applies to books provided by other sites, too, in Kindle format. Here's a screengrab from a page of the Project Gutenberg Complete Works of William Shakespeare:

See, that doesn't work at all. The entire play isn't like that, but still, that's a bummer. I do have another edition that was just a couple bucks on the Kindle store; that one has excellent formatting, but it has a totally different flaw: none of the plays includes the Dramatis personae. That's a headscratcher of an omission, and for me, it keeps me searching for a better edition. The Gutenberg one has the character lists, but you can see the formatting issues there. PDF files tend to work well, but the problem there is that you can't change the color of the background, so every PDF is black text on bright white. I prefer not-quite-black text on a not-quite-white background. Not an option on a PDF.

So, in terms of content, I find e-reading a different experience, with its own problems that I expect will get better over time. My biggest problem with e-reading on my tablet? It's not even reading. It's the fact that I can do all these other things on the tablet. Like checking e-mail. Flipping through Instagram. Websurfing. Reading blogs via RSS on Feedly (which I highly recommend as a successor to Google Reader, by the way). I can even watch Netflix on the thing.

But I can also read comics! That's pretty awesome.

More answers to come!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Old School FRP is a Tumblr blog devoted to vintage art and paraphernalia from the early days of role playing games -- think late 1970s and early 1980s. This is the image that greeted me the first time I saw the blog:

Oh yeah. That's the stuff. Poor Sheboygan!

:: I had no idea that the "Spider Man no more!" image was as iconic as it apparently is:

Cal has more. I could do this myself, leaving a pair of overalls in a trash can in a rainy alley. "Jaquandor no more!"

(But I won't. What else am I gonna do with my life?)

::  This is the strangest short film I have ever seen. It synchs a bunch of improvised trills by a trumpet player with close-ups of hand gestures by various cast members of Three's Company. It's oddly hypnotic, as you consider how each individual trumpet improv bit matches each individual set of looped hand gestures.

More next week!

Something for Thursday

Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of those composers who seems to exist in his own world, related to but not quite part of everything that was going on around him at the time. I often find in him a dreamy, almost otherworldly quality; there are influences, but he doesn't really fit into any particular school of thought. His music both stands squarely in the 20th century and looks back five hundred years. His musical voice is fascinating. Here is his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

What would you rather have named after you: a military maneuver ("The Picard Maneuver"), or a breakthrough medical procedure ("Tommy John surgery")?

(I'll assume nobody wants to have a disease named for them.)

Answers, the sixth!

A couple answers to questions from e-mail! (Anonymity requested.)

Do you know car makes and models? Do you feel strongly about what vehicle you have (or would like to have), or are you more indifferent?

I'm not terribly knowledgeable about cars, no. I do like the looks of Subaru Outbacks, and some of the various SUV-type vehicles out on the road these days, and that will likely be the direction I go if and when I'm in the market for a car again (the added size will be nice for transporting a string bass around). Other than that, I'd like a decent stereo to which I can connect my phone or other music players, and one day I would love to own a car with working A/C. And mileage will have to be at least 30 mpg. That's about it, though -- as for the rest (aesthetics, color, styling of the interior), I'll have to look around and see what catches my eye.

My current car is a 2003 Buick Century that I acquired from my unbelievably generous parents. I like it a lot, and my current plan is to drive it until it dies and/or falls apart. A car payment is a pretty large regular expense that I want to avoid having for as long as possible. (This is, of course, a changeable attitude based on when the royalty checks and movie offers for Princesses In SPACE!!! start pouring in. Heh!)

What pets would you ideally like to have? 42 cats? Cats and dogs? Exotic pets? Fish tank? Lizards? Hamster?

I'm fine with just cats, but I have a feeling that a dog is inevitable at some point or other. I'm not a dog person, but I don't rule it out. The Wife and The Daughter want a dog, though. It's gotta be a nice-sized dog, though. Not some annoying yippy thing that can fit in a purse. You know what dog I'd like, though? Verdell from As Good As It Gets. That was a cool dog.

I have a friend on Facebook (and Flickr and Instagram) who has a love-hate thing going on with her insane chihuahua. I want no part of that breed, as much as I love watching her dog's bizarre psychoses from afar!

Exotic pets? Nah, no interest, although a fish tank would be nifty. We had a hermit crab for a while and I wouldn't mind going that route again, as those are really low-maintenance. I don't know if I'd want any kind of rodent, and I have zero interest in reptiles of any sort. I like to look at 'em, but owning one and being responsible for it? Nah.

From a different questioner: You seem less enthusiastic about sports every year. With the Pirates on the verge of winning and your Bills at least with new coaches and a rookie QB, do you find yourself getting into it again?

Meh. Next question comes from...oh, OK, I'll revise and extend.

First, the Pirates: well, it's nice that they're winning. But it's not like I'm watching games; my following of their fortunes consists of checking scores and standings. I can't even name all the guys on their roster, and my sum total time spent each day checking baseball stuff is less than I spend reading the daily comics, and I read only four comic strips on a daily basis. (Five, on the three days a week that xkcd runs.)

As for the Bills...well, I've been thinking a lot about sports fandom in general over the last couple of years. It seems to me that any conversation on the degree to which we, as a culture, are wasting our time (here's an example of just such a conversation) that doesn't take sports into account as probably our single greatest societal time-waster, is likely missing a very big part of the point. In Buffalo, you cannot escape talk about the Bills and, perhaps even more, the NHL Sabres. I'd bet the a great percentage of the Buffalo area can name more members of either team's roster than, say, the members of the Erie County legislature.

But anyway, as for my own personal feelings on sports fandom, I look at the Bills and their recent fortunes and I generally shrug. Now that NFL teams are winding down training camps, and getting ready for the regular season which starts next weekend, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a guy at work toward the end of last season (or maybe the season before):

HE: Watch the Bills the other day?

ME: Nah. They're terrible.

HE: Yeah, but I still gotta watch 'em, you know?

ME: Why? I mean, really – they stink. Watching them is no fun at all.

HE: No, it sure isn't!

ME: Yeah! So I figure, if it's no fun to watch them, why bother at all?

HE: So you don't watch them at all?

ME: Nope. Watched a movie instead. Call me when they start winning.

HE: Oh...so you're a fair-weather fan.

And he said that last a little derisively. I had to admit that yes, I have become a fair-weather fan. I'm not interested in watching every game of a 6-10 season. I'm not interested in watching a team that's been bad for years add another bad year to its already double-digit list of losing years. So yeah, I'm a fair-weather fan. I'll like 'em when they win.

My question now is, what's wrong with that?

And the answer is: Nothing, as far as I can see.

The idea of a 'fair-weather fan' is obviously derived from a 'fair-weather friend'. That's a friend who is only a real friend when it's easy to be one. A fair-weather friend is with you when you have weddings or births or new jobs to celebrate, but they disappear when you have deaths in the family or you divorce or get fired or whatever. There's an old saying that "When times get bad, you find out who your real friends are." I suppose sports teams can say the same thing: "When times get bad – when we start losing a lot – we find out who out real fans are."

But here's the thing: fandom isn't friendship. Never has been, never will be. There is true virtue in friendship, and there is special virtue in the kind of friendship that endures trials and stalwartly marks the bad times as well as the good. That's just not the case with fandom, because with fandom, the personal emotional investment only goes in one direction. There is no virtue in being a fan, of anything, and by extension, there is no moral expectation in what one does in being a fan.

Another conversation I remember:

HE: I have tickets to the Sabres game tonight. Thank god it's the end of the season and I don't have to go to any more of their crappy games. I hate watching this team.

ME: Why go at all?

HE: [looks at me like I've just insisted that Earth is round and that Milton Berle was once President of the United States] They're my team. When you're a fan, you go support your team.

Erm...what?

The logic here, as best I can follow, is that if and when one's bad team actually gets good and wins a championship, it's going to feel so much sweeter for fans if they grudgingly stuck it out through the crappy years. It's an odd kind of puritanical thought that pleasure must be purchased through voluntary pain. It's of the same kind of mindset that I used to see when I worked in the restaurant business and people I knew to be regulars would come in and say things like, "Every time I come in here it's a little worse." I'm thinking, "Why come back?"

Why do we continue to force things upon ourselves that we have a strong reason to believe will be really unpleasant, in the name of "being a good fan"? Who the hell wants to be on their deathbed and say, "Well, my team still sucks, but I watched them suck each and every week?"

Yes, I've put in my time watching by football team stink for 13 years (a number which is likely to grow). I watched this team lose a game, at home, 6-3 whilst allowing the opposing quarterback to complete two passes. I've sat through well more than my fair share of crappy football games, and have finally come to this conclusion: if, four or five years from now, the Buffalo Bills actually win the Super Bowl, I will not feel the slightest bit of regret for having stopped watching them entirely for large segments of their Era of Suck. There will no Fan Cops on the streets that night, making sure that the revelers dancing beneath the streetlights are only those ones who have put in the correct amount of suffering through bad games. And when I die, there will be no Sports Fan Valhalla into whose golden halls I will be denied entry because I failed to watch each and every game when the Bills went 4-12 one year or because I didn't tune in to every single Sabres game down the stretch in a year where they missed the playoffs and finished thirteenth in the conference.

At this point in my life, I'm pretty much done with the figurative wearing of hair shirts.

One last one: Do you always use a real pie? Why not whipped cream in a can, or Cool-whip?

Because I'm all about authenticity, man. Go big or go home. A thing worth doing is a thing worth doing right. And it doesn't happen to me all that often, so when it does, it needs to be an event. Or something. The presence of a crust ensures most of the pie comes out of the pan, which means more stuff is on the face, which makes it look funnier, and it's all about looking ridiculous. I mean, really -- it sure ain't about dignity, and as Star Trek's Ferengi have taught us, "Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack." Might as well go for pie-faced absurdity.

More to come!

Merton's Heart

The Buffalo News ran this fascinating article about Thomas Merton, who lived for a time in Olean, NY and worked at St. Bonaventure University, from where my father has recently retired. My first part-time job was in that school's library, and I have seen and handled some of the very books referenced in the article. St. Bonaventure really does take pride in its place in Merton's life, and there's a lot of lore about it.

According to an old story, Merton used to love to walk in the woods around campus, where a clearing in the forest – shaped like a heart – remains.

It is visible from a great distance. Those who know of it call it “Merton’s Heart.”

Official sources at St. Bonaventure concur that the story is likely not true – that it’s just a bit of colorful embroidery on the legacy of a famous man.

But there it is. The name remains. It’s even on the walking tour.

“If you come to campus,” said Coughlin, the brother, “you get introduced to Merton’s heart.”

I wanted to post a photo of Merton's Heart, the clearing mentioned here, but there are only a few online that I could find, which surprises me. This photo is pretty much the exact view from the SBU library's rear windows (which are gigantic -- I really love that building and miss working there sometimes). I often thought about walking up there, but I was never sure where to go or park or if it was even allowed.

Anyway, it's a really good article, and it quotes a few folks I worked for back in the day. Check it out!

Sentential Links

Linkage....

:: I wish I knew then what I know now – that nothing can be fixed without first looking at what’s broken.

:: I was reading some old 'Savage Sword of Conan' last night, and it suddenly struck me what has always seemed strange about Conan as a fantasy character (and Hyboria as a fantasy world, for that matter). Conan was riding in on some adventure or other, getting ready to fight some slithery monster, and I suddenly realized--he has no elven friends. No dwarven friends either, for that matter.

:: Pick your favorite liquor—the one that makes you loose and happy, not upchucking into a clothes dryer. Get comfortable. Light a candle. Have two drinks. Slide down in your chair. And then gently place your fingertips on the hot, slick… buttons of your keyboard. If you’ve never written a sex scene before, you’re probably going to be either terrified or embarrassed, and both of those emotions are a lot easier to swallow when mixed with vodka. (Yipes! I'm not sure I'll ever write about the actual Act of Teh Sex. There really are areas where I'm a prude, I think! Those Princesses won't be having any Space Sex any time soon, I can tell you that. I'll send to a Space Nunnery first! via, by the way.)

:: So why not make ALL your shirts out of the same material as the pants, Doc Savage??? Those pants never rip but the shirts last all of ten seconds. Is it ego, Doc Savage?

:: Personal Top 10 Kaiju lists are things that need documenting. (How did I miss the boat on this? By spending too much time writing, that's how. Stupid writing.)

:: It's from that last line that I'd like to suggest that while it's perhaps accurate to apply "professional writer" only to those who make a living as writers, the material realities of the writing life make such a determination numerically meaningless.

:: The NSA has always had a problem with the open internet. Now a convergence of interests with large corporations is offering them the tools to destroy it.

More next week!

Nine

Happy birthday....

Answers, the fifth!

Might as well nail a few more Answers, huh? Fair warning: one of these is to a pretty odd question that I received via e-mail from someone who apparently wants to remain anonymous (and not the one who usually e-mails me good questions like that, either).

Andy asks (shortening a bit): Am I the only person that doesn’t trust anyone with a hyphenated name?

Probably not, but I'm not one of them. I've never much seen the big deal of this practice, but I did once know a guy who was really offended by the occasional practice, on some kind of odd Biblical justification that struck me as being a bit odd. Taking a man's last name when one marries is one of those practices that I think might make the best sense when seen in terms of avoiding confusion, as we expect surnames to denote family units. When you have a different one, it requires more verbiage to convey the existence of the family unit. "We're the Joneses!" becomes "Hi, I'm Ted Jones, and this is my wife, Alice Rambaldi."

But then I think, well, is it really that big a deal if one then can't think of that family as "the Joneses"? Or is it just something we expect because that's the way we've always done it? Ultimately, I guess I file this under "whatever the family wants to do is fine with me". And I say "the family" as opposed to "the woman" because I did know a couple once where, upon marriage, they both took on a completely new last name, different from what they'd each had before. I've never known anyone else who did that, but they took a creative tack, so who am I to judge? It's their family, their name. OK? OK!

Roger has a ton of questions, as always. Here's an interesting one:

I was reading Mark Evanier's column and he wrote recently: "The other e-mail was from someone who seems pretty happy Trayvon Martin is dead because, you know, he was a druggy gang member who probably deserved it. Martin may not have been guilty of something at that moment but he was foolish enough to go up against an armed man so he brought his death on himself. Or so this guy believes. I don’t think I’m going to consider him a friend any longer."
Did someone's politics/values/thoughtlessness ever end a friendship with you?

Yes, but not all that often. In fact, I can only think of one time, really, and it happened just this past winter, and it was the other person who jettisoned me, not vice versa. Go figure.

This person is an individual I knew in grade school. We weren't good friends then, but we weren't enemies either, although as kids can sometimes be, on occasion we strayed into adversarial territory. Nothing really major, if I recall correctly. But then, a couple years back, he friended me on Facebook, and I reciprocated.

One thing I discovered, that I didn't remember from high school, was that this fellow is Republican. In all-caps. It was kind of strange, I thought – not his conservatism, but the degree to which he seemed, based on his use of Facebook, to define himself by his politics, because that's virtually all he ever posted: Republican stuff, links to articles in very conservative media outlets, Republican photo memes, and so on. For a while he used as his profile pic a cartoon that had a cow's arse in close-up, and instead of cow-patties, the orifice in question was emitting the famous Obama 'O' logo. That's the kind of thing we're talking about here, and he was a pretty prolific poster, too. Lots and lots and lots of dispatches from Republicanland, each and every day, including global warming denialism and all manner of histrionics over the looming likelihood of "government completely taking over healthcare", and so on and so forth. Basically, he made himself a one-stop shop on Facebook for Republican talking points.

Now, on Facebook, I'm pretty much the same as I am on this blog: rarely political, and only when something really out-of-the-ordinary jolts me into a political mood. I think about issues a lot, but I just don't define myself that way. If you have one minute to get to know me, and I'm choosing the things I hope you walk away from that minute knowing about me, I'm fine if you only get a vague sense of my personal politics. Not so this other fellow: You will know what he believes. I mostly tended to scroll right past all the stuff he posted (and I have similar friends on the liberal side whose stuff I also tend to scroll right past, because I just don't think Facebook is at all useful for delving into political issues), choosing to interact instead with his occasional post about a teevee show or music or football or whatever. And all was well.

Until last Decemeber, and the Sandy Hook shootings.

That was one of my moments, one of my times when I just couldn't stay silent. I posted a few times that day, indicating that the awful event in Connecticut was my breaking point and that I was pretty much permanently moving my position on guns from "Not my thing, but rock on if you want" to "The hell with these damned tools for killing and our fetishization of them". (I only make that point here to illustrate the tale, not to invite a debate in comments. Not interested. At all.) Well, my friend decided to post a response that wasn't rude in any way. But still, it seems to me that there are times when you have to see how raw a person is and, well, maybe err on the side of not saying anything at all. So I responded back, fairly harshly, noting that I was not in any mood to hear from the gun-nut crowd and that when I wanted to hear his side's talking points, I knew quite well where to go and find them for myself.

That did not please him, and after a bit of back-and-forth – which really, in retrospect, was not all that heated – he took his ball and went home. I was unfriended within the hour. I think what really set him off was my casual comment that I see lots and lots and lots of Republican stuff on my Facebook timeline each and every day (he was far from my only friend on that side of the aisle), and yet when I post a single thing advancing my political view on a day of extreme hardship, I was suddenly confronted by a massive case of the vapors. It was really odd. He wasn't the only one to express dismay at what I said that day, but when I pointed out that apparently I'm supposed to listen to "All Republican all the time" without ever raising my hand to say something liberal, well, that was the end of that.

Since then I've become a lot more freehanded in my use of hiding stuff on Facebook. I still have only unfriended a handful of persons, and none of those were for politics. I like to think I have a good ability to get along with people on differing sides of the fence, although I do suspect that I, like most folks, may well gravitate more toward people of similar mindset to my own. For whatever reason, my classmate decided that we were too fundamentally unlike to interact in any way. That's his call, and from my readings of political history, I'm honestly not sure that "the tone" right now is really any worse than it's always been before, although there are troubling signs that give me pause, and I'm especially bothered by the fact that our political institutions really aren't built well for the kind of strict political polarization that we have now. And yes, I do think that the Right in this country needs to come back to Earth at some point. But that's for another day.

All right, that was awfully serious. So here's the really strange question posed to me via e-mail:

How do you pee in overalls???

Erm...OK. I'm going to assume that we're talking about, well, dealing with overalls in the bathroom, and not a more literal reading of that question. I've actually heard and read women complain over the years about overalls in the bathroom, to the point of actually dropping the shoulder straps in the toilet. Yeah...ewwww.

Well, the question's there, so...well, here it is. Don't unfasten the shoulder straps.

Huh? How does that make sense? Well, unless your overalls are super-tight – and they really shouldn't be – this should work. You leave the straps fastened, but unbutton the sides, those buttons at the hips. Usually there are two or three of them, and once you undo all those, the overalls will be super loose. At that point, just lower the straps down the shoulders and shrug your way out of them, much as you would a jumpsuit or a pair of coveralls. Then just lower them like any pants. You can tuck the extra material from the straps into the legs or something, if you wish.

Yes, this does work. I've had to execute this maneuver myself when the facilities were, shall we say, not well-endowed for space. And in general, I find mucking about with a belt and all that other jazz on normal pants to be just as big a pain in the butt in cramped restroom quarters as bib overalls.

Annnnnnd, we're done here. More answers to come!

(And if you still want to ask, feel free! Just not about bodily functions and how they relate to overalls. I think I'm done writing about that. Forever.)

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Happy birthday, Spitzer Space Telescope! The image leading the article there was a masthead image for this blog for a while last year.

:: Behold, the Geek Zodiac.

Via.

More next week!