Caillou In Inappropriate Places II

Yes, I suppose this will become a semi-regular feature (here's the first time), because, well, making fun of Caillou is an awful lot of fun! So join me as we follow Caillou into more inappropriate places!

Caillou reacts to Pepper Spray Cop!

Caillou hangs out with the boys in the trenches of World War I!

Caillou tries to help out during the Dust Bowl!

Caillou joins the cast of Showgirls!

Stay tuned for more whacky and inappropriate misadventures of everybody's least-favorite follicly-challenged four-year-old!

Sentential Links

Linkage!

:: So I ask again, who won World War II? Was it the Allies? The Americans? The Soviet Union?

I believe that the real victory of World War II came from the emaciated symphony of Leningrad. In a deeper sense, the real victories in life belong to those who never give up. (I followed a few links from Facebook and ended up here, a blog I'd never seen before.)

:: I read an article this weekend about this movie and how Bollywood has no history of Superheroes in their film industry or even in Indian culture. They had to build a mythology from scratch in order to sell their target audience on the idea of a hero with superpowers. (A Bollywood superhero movie? This, I gotta see.)

:: The key is that what I do is find topics to write on, and throw random thoughts in an electronic folder until the ideas start writing themselves. You ever read about a writer on a TV show or a novelist talk about dictating itself to them, rather than the other way around? It’s sort of like that. (Blogging used to be that way for me, but as I've made the decision that my fiction writing must be the focus, blogging has to be dug at and pried a bit. Strange.)

:: As you know by now, I have no use for books that are written according to a marketable formula, and containing no heart. Somewhere, sometime, a writer has to leave drops of blood on his or her pages.

:: A much shorter version of all the above is that I can put on $120 worth of clothes and shoes and be taken seriously almost anywhere I might want to go. So that’s what I do. Not everyone gets to do it. These facts are worth thinking about.

:: Goddman, I love comic books.

:: I am not one of those people who harp continually about how the series needs to be cancelled because it’s not as good as when it was one of the best series of all time, but how do you go forward without Edna Krabappel? (That's the whole post, but I couldn't agree more. Thanks for the laughs over four decades, Marcia Wallace!)

More next week!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I think that you can not name a single human pursuit that does not have, somewhere on this planet, a museum devoted to it. Case in point: A museum to French fries.

:: A bit of set-up here: The Wife's car has satellite radio, which is pretty cool. We like the stations devoted to specific decades in popular music. Usually we stick the 70s and 80s, with occasional dips into the 60s. One night, I took her car to pick up some pizza, and I decided, on a lark, to listen to the 40s channel, whereupon I heard this song. I admit that my first impulse, based on my living in a more cynical time, was to laugh, but as it played and as I later listened to it at home, I had to admit a certain admiration for the music of a period when the default position in art was not "jaded irony". There's something to be said for such open honesty in art. Anyway, here's a song called "The Old Master Painter".


I'm not sure this is the version I heard that night, but it's pretty representative. There are a bunch of them on YouTube.

More next week!

All good things must end...even local breakfast joints

Terrific article about the closing of a beloved local restaurant in Indiana:

On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before the lock refused to lock, before the claw crashed through the roof, the old man paced.

Tap, tap, tap. Bud Powell’s aluminum cane led the way as he circled the floor of Bloomington’s Waffle House. His Waffle House.

That Wednesday in September, the owner didn’t know what to do with himself. The smell of frying oil, the same greasy perfume that had greeted customers for 46 years, wafted into his nose as he wandered past the vinyl booths. He sat down, then stood
up again.

Bud — everyone called him Bud — checked on the dwindling supply of breakfast sausage, peered into the nearly empty freezers, tried to explain to his regulars why it had to be this way.

“It’s time,” he said over and over.

Do read the whole thing. It's a very good piece of writing. It seems to me that there needs to be a name for this mini-genre of writing, in which writers make you miss places you've never been.

I am NOT a Minion!

New yellow fleece, huzzah! #fleece #overalls #Dickies #library, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I just like yellow. Sheesh.

Something for Thursday

Here is Howard Shore's main theme to my favorite horror film, The Silence of the Lambs. Happy Halloween!

A bit of parenting advice

A message from Roald Dahl. Be SPARKY, people! #Quote #RoaldDahl #DannyTheChampionOfTheWorld, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Courtesy Roald Dahl, in his amazing book Danny the Champion of the World. If you haven't read this beautiful, funny, moving, and exciting story, what's keeping you!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Bad puns: Do you like them, or not?

(Bonus: If you DO like them, what's your favorite one?)

A sketch

We stood on the balcony of our room while on vacation, looking across the street at the moonlit beach. There were people still about on the Promenade -- not many, but it wasn't deserted, not quite yet. Most of the people who were out were young. Couples in love, or couples who might be in love someday, or couples who weren't couples but who were just hanging out because they weren't couples with anybody else yet.

Along came a couple. Definitely a couple. I could tell, despite the fact that they were only in my sight for less than ten seconds. They were riding the same skateboard, him in back, her in front, their hands joined, their bodies leaning in unison. He was tall and lanky, she was tiny -- probably the only way a couple could even fit on the same skateboard. But it was dark, and he realized that the skateboard was heading not for a smooth transition from street to sidewalk, but rather, right for a curb. So he slowed, but not slow enough, and stepped back, off the skateboard onto the street. But she didn't know this was going to happen, so she was still on wheels and moving forward a lot faster.

They never let go, though. She held tight to his hands and he held tight to hers, and as the skateboard surged forward without him on it, she simply allowed herself to lean back, back, ever farther back, until he was supporting her by the hands as she stopped the skateboard but was lying backward at a forty-five degree angle. They hung there, the two of them, having narrowly avoided a crash. She gave out a scream, but it was a scream of delight, the scream of a girl on a thrill ride with a guy she loved, and he laughed, and then she laughed too. Then he kicked the skateboard up onto the sidewalk, they jumped on again, and with two kicks of his left foot, they were off again and out of my sight.

Through that whole thing, they never let go of each other's hands.

This was four months ago. I hope they're still holding hands, somewhere.

Four Days to #NaNoWriMo!

In four days, NaNoWriMo 2013 kicks off! I'm still torn over whether to just keep going on GhostCop (not the actual title) until the draft is done, or put it aside and return to it at a later time in favor of Lighthouse Boy. I'm leaning toward the former, mainly because I don't like leaving unfinished manuscripts, especially once I get more than 60000 words in, which is where I am right now. Hopefully it doesn't take an entire month to finish the book. I doubt it will, because I really don't see this book being all that long. We'll see!

Anyway, I am now starting to ramp up my production. My plan, as last year, is to attack the first few weeks with vigor, so that if I need to back off along the way for any reason, I have a cushion built in. Or something like that. Who knows. My main plan is to just write my ever-lovin' ass off. The only difference for me, really, between NaNoWriMo and AnyOtherMo is the page on the calendar!

(Hashtag in post title in use for when this post appears as a Twitter link.)

One perk of owning lots of overalls

Every year around Halloween, I enjoy going on Twitter and seeing all kinds of this going on:

Apparently everyone is gonna be a minion this year for Halloween bc this thrift store is sold out of overalls lol

— Jessica Lesaca (@jessicalesaca) October 28, 2013

If anyone has overalls/suspenders please let me know ASAP!

— YuanQiu (@YuanQiu98) October 28, 2013

If anyone has overalls it would be much appreciated.

— Emma LaRue (@emmamaelarue) October 28, 2013

Does anyone have overalls I can borrow??? Pweeeaaaassseee

— Kaylee Fee (@CadetFee) October 28, 2013

Why are overalls and yellow shirts so hard to find?!?! What in earth.

— Julie Renee (@julierenee6) October 28, 2013

average day in the life of Sam... wandering around Value Village looking for overalls.

— Sam Irwin (@ski_1997) October 28, 2013

I'm starting to feel like Dwight Schrute in that episode of The Office, when it's Christmas so he finds out what the hot new toy is, buys every single one in Scranton, and then eBays them all for a tidy profit. Except I'm not selling my overalls, so it's really not like that at all.

Anyway....

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I'm not sure if this is weird or awesome:

Beard yeast might sound icky at first, but it's really grown on one Oregon brewmaster.

Rogue Ales, a brewery and pub based in Newport, Ore., is developing an ale made out of yeast harvested from the beard of award-winning brewmaster John "More Hops" Maier.

The whole thing started as a joke. Brett Joyce, president of Rogue Ales, told KPTV on Sunday that the folks at Rogue Ales had been trying to harvest a new yeast strain from their hop yard for some time, but with little success.

Then the thought occurred to Joyce, "Why not look for a different place that might have some magic yeast in it?"

Brewery employees took nine follicles from Maier's beard, which Maier says has not been shaved since 1978.

:: Albino whale shark. Wow.

More next week!

Wow.

Filament Eruption Creates 'Canyon of Fire' on the Sun, originally uploaded by NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

That is all.

"A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion. The 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun's atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion."

Click through for more.

Something for Thursday

The bad news is that the BBC's third season of Sherlock won't air until January. Ugh! Meantime, here's a bit of Sherlockian music!

Miklos Rozsa wrote a wonderful score for a film called The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Here is a suite from that score:


A nice contrast is this score by an underrated and underused composer named Bruce Broughton, for the film Young Sherlock Holmes. I always had a difficult time with this film, owing to its odd conversion of Holmes into an Indiana Jones-like adventurer and its somewhat downbeat ending. The music, though, is quite good.


And then there's the BBC's theme, which is incredibly earwormy:


By the way, my personal favorite portrayal of Sherlock Holmes came in an episode of Magnum PI, in which Patrick Macnee plays a friend of Higgins's who has gone delusional to the point of believing himself to be Holmes. It's a really good episode, called "Holmes is Where the Heart Is". Worth checking out, if you have access to the show...I believe it's on Netflix.

The game's afoot, folks!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Do you listen to podcasts? If so, which ones, and why?

Yes, this is a thinly-veiled solicitation for suggestions. I already listen to a few, but I wouldn't mind finding more. I listen to the podcasts on the Trending Buffalo site (some of my favorite local commentary comes from this site), The Human Bible (endlessly fascinating if a secular take on the Bible is your thing), and I've listened to Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Star Talk podcast (although that one has ads inside it, which kind of bugs me, especially when I'm listening in the car and can't access my tablet to skip past the ads). Oh, and I listen to Night Vale, so I'm aware of that one.

The X-Manatees

I am stealing this from Tumblr, because I love it so.

I believe this is the original artist.

One word at a time, man. One word at a time.

The current book, GhostCop (not the actual title), really gave me some fits toward the end of last month and the beginning of this one. The story reached a point where I had no idea what was coming next, and what was coming next refused to reveal itself. So I had an uncomfortably large number of days where I didn't write a single word.

But as you can tell by my tracking spreadsheet, I broke through quite nicely, finally figuring out the direction that most of the story elements need to go. My main problem now is that I really wanted to get this draft done in time for NaNoWriMo, but I'm not sure that's in the cards right now. That being the case, I will likely keep writing this one until it's done, even if that leads into NaNoWriMo, at which point I will casually segue into Lighthouse Boy (not the actual title).

Sometimes this writing thing is hard. Maybe it would be easier if I bothered outlining or plotting things in advance in some way, but the notion of doing that really bugs me, for some reason. I'm just not wired to stick to an outline.

I am wired, however, to keep writing until the day I drop. Excelsior! Onward and upward! Zap! Pow!!

Sentential Links!!!

It's time for...LINKAGE!!!

:: You probably judge me, condemn me from your ivory tower, safe from addictive substance. But you are only an accident, a painful illness, an injury away from being in my shoes. I did not choose this, I really had no choice.

:: Sometimes I forget that writing is a living, breathing thing; that the story (or the poem, etc.) not only transforms you and feeds you, but is transformed and fed because of you. Erin Bow in her interview with the Quill & Quire last month said that she thinks she writes what she will ultimately end up needing. And I wonder if there's truth in that for every writer.

:: Lots of people put up big, ugly walls and we get that they’re cries for help so everyone rallies and tries to tear it down, but if you put up a wall and pant something pretty on it, nobody is going to ask what’s behind that wall and that’s the true danger of charisma. (That's actually the whole post.)

:: Curse your memory. Curse the timing of lightning. Curse the notepad, which always parts ways with the pen you were certain you put it next to. Curse writing. Who invented it, anyway? It’s their fault you’re even in this mess.

:: Bottom line, none of us are the same. Thank God. Life would be so boring. That's why it's important for you to never give up on your piece of art until you've gone as deep as you can go. That's where the story lies and where you will find your true voice.

:: I am so many pieces of these songs. They are moments in my life. They somehow fill these aching holes – the holes that I am learning will never truly be filled – well, they temporarily plug them with their verses, and choruses. Their bridges bridge the gap between broken and whole. For a few moments, I can feel free.

:: Lou Scheimer, the man who founded Filmation Studios, died a few days ago at the age of 84. Mark Evanier has a very nice post about him. I just had to mark it here and say a little thank you for contributing to a childhood that relished in fantasy and the imagination, and delighted at such things as lion men, monkey sidekicks, and ghostbusting gorillas.

:: Uncle Merlin called in from the Cape this morning to report he’s having woodpecker trouble. Judging by his description, a female downy has punched a hole in the eave of his house. He wanted to know how to drive her away.

More next week!!!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: If it seems like virtually every 30-40-something woman you know is named "Jennifer", well, here's why. This also shows that in about ten to fifteen years, the world will be run by Emily's, Emma's, and Sophia's.

(And please tell me that the recent surge of Isabella's is not because of Twilight. I'd hate to think that such an awful book is going to live so long in American consciousness.)

:: In many places, you get a ticket if you leave your car parked for too long. Apparently not so in a town in China, where if you leave your car parked too long, something else happens.

All for this week. More next. Maybe. Who knows. Hmmmmm....

The kind of weird thought that keeps me from achieving success

Regarding this clip from The Karate Kid:


I think it would be funny if this clip just went on and on and on, with the Evil Sensei just listing all these things that do not exist in his dojo.

FEAR does not EXIST in this DOJO, does it?

NO SENSEI!!!

PAIN does not EXIST in this DOJO, does it?

NO SENSEI!!!

DEFEAT does not EXIST in this DOJO, does it?"

NO SENSEI!!!

GHOSTS do not EXIST in this DOJO, do they?

NO SENSEI!!!

RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON does not EXIST in this DOJO, does he?

NO SENSEI!!!

A LARGE PIZZA WITH EXTRA CHEESE AND ACHOVIES does not EXIST in this DOJO, does it?

NO SENSEI!!!

ETHEL MERMAN does not EXIST in this DOJO, does she?

NO SENSEI!!!

In other news....

Comet ISON Appears Intact

Comet ISON Appears Intact, originally uploaded by NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

Wow. That is all.

Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

Whoops. Sorry, folks. Here's some very famous Rachmaninov, the Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra on a Theme of Paganini. (The work's most famous section, the 18th Variation, comes at the 15:28 mark, for those curious.)


The Paganini tune that forms the backbone of this work has inspired a lot of composers over the last 150+ years. We played a fascinating different set of variations on the same theme in the concert band when I was in college...but few settings beat Rachmaninov's.

Anyway, enjoy and have a fine weekend! Maybe I'll even have some -- gasp! -- new content at some point!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Scary Halloween or 'cute' Halloween?

A writing update, an apology for a lack of nifty content, and a cool photo!

In order, the things mentioned in the title to this post:

1. A Writing Update.

Starting about halfway through September, I entered a protracted slump, wherein I had a terrible time figuring out what was supposed to happen in GhostCop (not the actual title). So severe was this slump that I actually failed to write a single word for 10 of the last 14 days of that month, including the entire final week. It was a disaster, which put me really far behind where I wanted to be; I was hoping to have the draft of this novel done by the time November rolled around, so I could so into NaNoWriMo with a totally new project (actually, an old one: I'm returning to work on Lighthouse Boy).

The malaise continued into October (partly abetted by my vacation last week). But during that stretch, I started to see glimmers of a possible resolution to my story's difficulties, and now, I seem to be back on track. Eight of the last nine days I've managed to write over 1000 words, the last two days I've written over 2000 words, and even that one "off" day saw 700 words, which is acceptable. Will I get the draft done by NaNoWriMo? I...don't know. I do know that this book is going to be significantly shorter than Princesses In SPACE!!! or Lighthouse Boy, but I'm really not sure how long it will be in the end. But I have more than two weeks left this month, and if I can keep cranking, who knows...maybe I can at least get to the point where I can finish it in the first part of NaNoWriMo. We shall see.

It's tough, though, when the mojo goes away.

2. An Apology for a Lack of Nifty Content.

Yeah...sorry about that. I'm hoping to get more good stuff done here, by way of writing posts beforehand and scheduling them. But I've been really pushing forward on GhostCop, so I can make no promises. I'm going to try to have something up here on a regular basis, even if it's not of "penetrating essay" quality.

3. A Cool Photo!

This is amazing. I saw this on Twitter today, via a user named Usman Masood. The photo:

Mr. Masood's caption was very clever:

This is a ship-shipping ship, shipping shipping ships.

How awesome is that!

Thanks for stopping by, and stay classy, San Diego!

Productivity!

I wrote 2000 words today, got some reading done, and cleaned my desk.

Callin' it a night.

Don't taunt the football gods.

The Houston Texans are supposed to be one of the best teams in the NFL this year, but they've had some hiccups, including some very erratic play by Matt Schaub, their starting quarterback. Going into yesterday's game, Schaub had thrown a "pick-6" -- an interception that was returned by the other team for a touchdown -- in three consecutive games. And yesterday, the visiting St. Louis Rams jumped out to a lead, so when Schaub got hurt and the backup QB had to come in, the fans in Houston cheered.

The football gods took notice of this.

That backup quarterback promptly came in and...threw a pick-6.

Taunt not the football gods! For they are a spiteful bunch.

Sunday Burst of THE WORST THING EVER

Oddities and Awesome abound. So does jaw-dropping awfulness, like this.


Yeah...sorry, folks, but it is, by a wide margin, the single weirdest thing I saw online all week.

(In all seriousness, the "group" Ylvis is actually a comedy duo, and this song was meant as a simple silly parody thing, but then it went "viral". Here's an article about the phenomenon -- it's really not unlike how, for a time, Steve Martin was completely overshadowed by his own "King Tut".)

Lester is silently judging my writing.

Lester is silently judging my writing., originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

"Me write book better dan dis guy."

Something for Thursday

A repeat today, because this is one of those pieces to which I return every now and again. This is one of the most beautiful choral works I know, a simple and stunning setting of the folk song "Shenandoah".

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Assuming you can be guaranteed to live to tell the tale, what historic battle would you most like to witness?

Sentential Links

Linkage....

:: I’m wondering what others do to get inspired and keep themselves from getting distracted? It is definitely something I am still trying to do. (I try to incorporate distraction into my routine, inasmuch as I even have a routine. I should probably get a routine. Hmmmm....This is a brand new blog, by the way. I met this fellow on Instagram. Check him out!)

:: So reading fantasy novels is perhaps a second best to being able to distract myself with my own stories, but at least it lets me go to sleep without focusing on the ugly stuff happening in the world.

:: I suppose I don’t have a great emotional attachment to it. If I found a much better one I might give this one up. Maybe. A thing doesn’t have to be very good or very special to make one happy.

:: All female Doctor Who companions have been held under intense scrutiny since the show returned in 2005, and while the narrative of critique often starts out with “let’s look at how the showrunner/scriptwriters have screwed up in portraying female characters” somehow it often seems to come down to burying those female characters under criticism and complaints while the Doctor and male companions get away largely unscathed.

:: If I’m a curmudgeon about Gravity, it’s because it turned out not to be the movie I wanted to see. I wanted an Apollo 13 about a problem the space industry is seriously worried about right now. I want a movie of Downbelow Station and The Forever War and The Stars My Destination. I want a movie about living and working in space that’s actually about living and working in space. If I squint real hard, I can turn Gravity into that movie. But it’s not, quite, and that made me just a little bit sad.

:: Getting upset, brooding and/or feeling despair over things you cannot possible change prevent you from changing what you can, and moving forward, and enjoying your writing life. So: let it go. Accept that there will always be things about Publishing that you can't change, and that will stop them from depressing you and getting between you and the page. (Oh, so, so hard! Letting go the frustration of my currently unending sea of rejection is the hardest of things for me to do. I read an article a few weeks ago about self-publishing in which the writer indicated that "You won't get rich doing this", which...well hey, I'm not rich now, so what of that? But then he said, "You can't even live off it, really." And then he named the figure that he makes per month...and it's more than I'm making now, by a comfortable margin. Hmmmmm....)

:: Why conjure an illusion when you can spend a quarter on a cheap prank? "And I would've gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids and your dumb Asgardian God of Thunder!"

:: My wife was baking muffins and was out of baking soda and wanted to know what she could use instead. I have no idea, and in fact, have confused baking soda with baking powder. I do know, once upon a time, I used one instead of the other in making pancakes, took one bite of the bitter batter concoction and threw them out.

More next week!

Snapshots from Ithaca

This weekend The Wife and I made our annual getaway to the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival, and we had a great time as always...although the festival itself wasn't quite like it usually is, owing to the fact that Ithaca is in the midst of tearing apart its pedestrian mall to rebuild it (in truth, the infrastructure there was looking a bit long in the tooth, and I look forward to seeing what things look like when it's done). I know that pedestrian malls aren't thought of very highly anymore, but Ithaca is a small enough city that they are able to pull it off -- it's all of three blocks, and there's plenty of parking and lots of nice businesses to frequent.

Anyway, it all started with a trip to a knitting supply store just outside of town, which is one of the nicer yarn shops we've found in our travels of such. The Wife ended up with a small pile of yarn to add to her stash:


Then we were off to downtown, where our first order of business was lunch at Waffle Frolic, a restaurant that we absolutely adore. This is their counter.


Since The Wife went on a gluten-free diet last year, we were thrilled to discover that Waffle Frolic has GF waffles. Even better, though, was that we learned that they also have GF fried chicken, so that we were both able to have waffles and fried chicken, which is one of the finest of all food combos. I never heard of it before a few years ago, but I am seriously in the tank for waffles and fried chicken, folks!


Next was some shopping and milling about. As I said, the Festival usually takes up the entire pedestrian mall, but this time it was sequestered mostly to either end of the mall, so there was more walking than usual, which was fine. There's food and lots of crafts, with a great deal of stuff available that is made by local or regional artisans. I am increasingly a fan of buying things that are locally made, and if I can buy it directly from the person who made it, then that's fantastic.

Now this was funny. There's a comics store there that I usually go into, more to find something to bring back for The Daughter than for myself (I love comics, but I find that they tend to be wildly overpriced, which is why I tend to exclusively rely on the library for comics reading). Looking through the wares, I found a case with some toys and action figures and the like inside, and on top was this giant model of the starship Enterprise, in my favorite design that ship has ever sported:


As soon as I took the photo, though, the owner was right there to give me a tongue-lashing for taking photos in his shop. He went on some rant about the need to control or limit the technology, now that everyone has access to photography. I honestly did not understand the point he was making -- is he worried about people using iPhone cameras to scan comics pages in his store so that they don't have to buy the comics? It's not like any of the stuff in there is his intellectual property, and besides, many times I've chosen to go into a business or store because someone posted a picture from within and said, "Check out the cool stuff this store has!" Weird. He also pointed to the "No photographs!" sign that maybe I should have seen...but the sign is above the door in the back of the store that leads to their back room, it's about the size of an index card, and it's taped to a wall that is also covered with all manner of comics-related posters and artwork. I offered to delete the photo, but he said that wasn't necessary. I bought a little TARDIS for The Daughter -- it has a little light on top -- but I think I'll be foregoing that shop in future trips to Ithaca. If he doesn't want word getting out that he has cool shit in his store, then I'm happy to oblige.

Nice model, though.

On a happier note, the lack of pedestrian traffic in usual areas meant that I got to actually get up close to one of the Sagan Planet Walk markers! This is a public art installation in Ithaca, honoring the memory of Carl Sagan (one of my eternal heroes), in which stone markers are placed throughout the town in such a way as to constitute a walking tour of the Solar System, with the distances between the markers proportionally accurate to the distances between the planetary orbits. According to the website for the Planet Walk (associated with the Ithaca Sciencenter), the markers for the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are in temporary storage (with temporary signage indicating their location, so that the Planet Walk is still possible). But I got to pose with Jupiter. Yay, Jupiter!


Finally, I visited my favorite used bookstore, Autumn Leaves. I only bought a couple of books this time -- I'm trying to cut down my book acquisition until such time as we acquire more space for book storage, which will involve moving -- but I always love going in that store. It's bright and open and airy and inviting. And in their storefront window, they had a mannequin, attired thusly:


It's like they knew I was coming!

All in all, a lovely trip, and I'm sad it's over. There are two places I'd like to live on this world, other than right here. One is Toronto. The other is Ithaca!

You think YOUR Monday sucks?

I wonder how long it took this truckdriver to figure out what to say in his phone call to his employers.

I've been fond, for a couple of years, of the metaphor of a "tire fire" for something that's going incredibly poorly. This driver, though, gets to use that phrase literally. That's a bad day, folks.

Back Roads of WNY

I'm pretty sure that I inherited from my father a general sense of antipathy for expressways. When we'd take long roadtrips, when I was a kid, such as going from our home in Allegany, NY to New Jersey (near Philadelphia) to visit my grandmother, we would often take some route through Pennsylvania that was almost entirely 2-lane roads, sometimes feeling like a lot of over-hill-and-over-dale. A lot of times back then I'd wonder why we just didn't take the Interstates and get there faster, and it wasn't until much later that I realized that Interstates are boring. Except for freeways in cities, which are cool, expressways are just a whole lot of dull. So it's come that I, too, look for alternate routes that might make a trip take a bit longer, but also makes the drive more pleasant, more adventurous. Expressways are designed to take you past places, which is why they're always built in the really boring stretches of land. It's always amazing to me that some roads can spend a great deal of their length within just a few miles of the thruway, and yet the driving experience is so starkly different.

The main routes out of Buffalo, for just about any location, are either Interstate 90 (going east or west) or US 219 (going south). Both of these routes are really boring drives. US 219 is only a thruway for about twenty miles; just south of Springville it's two-lane all the way to PA. And that two-lane stretch can be very nice in a few spots, but that road has become such a main route south that I just find the whole thing rather boring. As for I-90, well...it's I-90. Mile after mile after mile of boring, flat road. (Which is also a toll road, another reason why I avoid it like the plague.) So here are some of my favorite roads!

US 20A: Orchard Park to Canandaigua. This is, by far, my favorite road just about anywhere. (The main road through Yellowstone may outrank it.) It's a hilly road through mostly rural areas, and in the space of about ninety minutes driving it you go from the longer rises and falls in Erie County to the much hillier terrain of the Finger Lakes region. In fall, this drive is amazing. We take this road most times on our annual fall getaway, since the road ends near Canandaigua, NY, southwest of Rochester and a few miles from Victor, NY, where we like to stay overnight. Notable feature: the steep descent into, and ascent out of, Warsaw, NY. The road is so steep here that trucks are required to exit the road and take an alternate route.

NY 39: Springville to Geneseo. Route 39 actually runs from US 20 near Dunkirk all the way to Avon, NY (a small town about fifteen miles outside of Rochester), but I'm only familiar with the part between Springville and Geneseo. It's another hilly, gorgeous ride, especially between Springville and Yorkshire, when it closely tracks Cattaraugus Creek. I don't take this road often as we're rarely in a position to go east or west from Springville. But this is another wonderful trek through rural NY. We just drove this the other day, and it was refreshing to see new stuff! Notable feature: NY 39 parallels Letchworth State Park, and runs with US 20A for a short while near Geneseo.

NY 354: Buffalo to Attica. Also known as Clinton Street. I love this road in winter, because it runs along a lot of high ridges that give nice, long views of snowy fields with the lights of Buffalo in the distance. I drove this often when The Wife worked in Batavia. Not as often now, but I like to incorporate this road into return trips from Rochester. Notable feature: Nothing stands out, except the views. On a clear, cold winter night, particularly with a bright moon, this road is tops.

NY 98: Franklinville to Batavia. This road actually starts outside Great Valley in the Southern Tier and runs all the way to Lake Ontario, but the part I'm mostly familiar with is between Franklinville and Batavia. We mostly would end up on this road when traveling to Arcade, NY for a pancake breakfast every year during maple season. Another hilly rural route that goes more through farmland than forest, which makes for a different kind of drive. Also, as a north-south route, ascents and descents tend to be much longer, and there are a few spots where, on a really clear day, you can probably see the Buffalo skyline from the farthest possible vantage point short of being on a boat on Lake Erie. Notable feature: spectacular views of the huge wind farm along the north-south ridges, if you like wind turbines. (I do.)

NY 240: Orchard Park to Ashford. The roads I've described thus far are hilly routes; NY 240 is almost exclusively a valley road, and it's a nice alternative to the "usual" routes from Buffalo to the Southern Tier, US 219 and NY 16. Route 240 runs through a fairly narrow series of valleys, past a couple of Erie County's main ski resorts, and follows the rushing waters of Cazenovia Creek's West Branch. There is an abandoned rail line along the route that is the focus of a possible rails-to-trails project. It's also a surprisingly twisting road, so if curves are your thing, this may be the road for you. South of Springville, if memory serves, the road is notably rougher than its northern half. NY 240 actually comprises all of Harlem Road in Buffalo, so it actually connects Amherst to Ashford. Additionally, 240 is the main drag through Orchard Park, and The Store lies on 240. So this is one of the roads my life centers around! But the part south of OP is a very nice drive. Notable feature: Mill Rd, between 240 and East Aurora, is a nice short drive that includes the wonderful Mill Rd. Overlook, a spot where the road is at the top of a bare hill facing north. The view is only spoiled by, ironically enough, a big sign exhorting people to "Save this view!" (They want to prevent someone from buying the large field there and turning it into yet another development clogged with McMansions.)

NY 16: Buffalo to the PA State line, south of Olean. This is actually one of the main routes from Buffalo to the Southern Tier, but I'm listing it anyway because it has a pretty unique character all its own. The road actually goes all the way to downtown Buffalo, but for my purposes, it's notable for being the main drag through East Aurora and a decent connector to the Olean area (where The Parents still reside). It's also a fairly pretty drive, too, especially in fall when you start getting into the hilly regions. Most notable for me about NY 16, though, is that of all these roads, it's on 16 that I get the strongest sense of New York on the wane. All the other roads have old stuff along their ways, but for some reason, everything along NY 16 feels older, and much more distant from the days when some of these places were a going concern. I just drove this road the other day, and I noticed at one point a building whose business had long-since closed, and at the road there was a onetime illuminated sign. The signage itself was gone, but the frame of the sign was intact, with the lightbulbs still there. There's an old surplus store in a town called Machias that's been closed for a while, but the huge banners advertising Carhartt apparel are still stapled to the storefront. All of these roads have, to some degree, a "days gone by" feel, but NY 16 is the road that most feels like Time has won the battle.

Obviously this has been Southtowns-centric and mainly focused on roads going either south or east from this region, because those are the directions we mostly find ourselves traveling. But what others are out there? What roads do you folks like?

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Links fixed. Sorry folks, I don't know what happened there.

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: We've made a weekly ritual in these parts of going to a local artisanal cupcake joint that launched a couple of years ago. They're very creative with their wares, and we look forward each week to seeing the online posting of their special flavors and planning our Saturday visit. Now, they have come up with some doozies of strange flavors, but thus far, they have to my knowledge attempted nothing like this. I'm not even gonna describe it. Just go look.

(No, I would not partake of those. I'm not wild about mango.)

:: Dinosaur porn exists. The world is odd and I'm not sure I like it.

That is all.

Writing in the hotel room

A little work before play. #AmWriting, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Getting a little work done before we head to Ithaca, because as Captain Malcolm Reynolds once said, "We work before we play."

He also said some other stuff, but that's the one that's relevant here.

Breaking Brown

I was in a pretty oddly dark mood this morning, so I tweeted the following:

I like to think that when he turned 18, Encyclopedia Brown got sick of the whole thing and committed a string of still-unsolved murders.

Of course, my brain being the brain it is, I couldn't stop turning that over in my head, so I imagined the following scenario:

:: Encyclopedia grows more and more grim and despondent; maybe he starts dressing in black. He spends less time with Sally Kimball, who is hurt by this. He closes his detective business.

:: His first victim is, of course, Bugs Meany, whom he kills in a way that leaves no visible markings of trauma on the corpse and which vexes the Idaville medical examiner, who hasn't had much to do in eighteen years. Encyclopedia leaves the body by the back door of that delicatessen that the first paragraphs of each Encyclopedia Brown book make a point of mentioning.

:: Encyclopedia's string of murders begins after his father, the Idaville police chief, announces his intention to retire.

:: When the second victim is found near one of Idaville's two movie theaters, a palpable sense of fear descends on this quiet community. Chief Brown's years of successful law enforcement are called into question. He brings details home to Encyclopedia, who uses his own knowledge of the case to send his father down wild goose chases before he ultimately just refuses to do anything more.

:: The murders continue, until finally Sally Kimball discovers the key piece of evidence that Encyclopedia forgot about, and gives it to Chief Brown, who must now arrest his own son.

But...

WHAT WAS THE CLUE THAT TIPPED SALLY OFF?

(turn to page 78 for the solution!)

The Law of Dietary Miracles

In any comments thread on a social media site pertaining to some new diet that someone is trying out, a commenter will report that a relative of theirs tried that same diet and hasn't had a migraine since.

Answers, the Tenth (and maybe the last?)

All right, let's get our nose off this particular grindstone, shall we?

Here's the final question of the ones that were posed by various anonymous readers:

Is the middle class terminal? Assuming it is how do we convince people to strive if opportunity is not there? If we are not striving aren't we just, well, breathing?

This is a question that I think about a lot. I honestly am not really sure, but I do wonder from time to time if the pace of technological improvement is going to render large parts of our economy obsolete. And then, what?

Manufacturing is going to become more and more automatic. I think most folks believe that our kids will live to see cars that drive themselves, and in fact, in a hundred years, our descendants may look back on us, shaking their heads, and say, "Can you believe they used to take control of two-ton vehicles and maneuver them in tight quarters at high speeds?!"

Putting the problem bluntly: What do we do if and when we reach a point where there simply isn't enough work for people to do? Our entire economy is built on the idea: Someone with money determines that work needs done, and pays someone some of their money to do it. There really could be a time when there isn't enough work for people. The natural question then is, then what? Can people be trusted to find things to do to occupy their time? Will they make work for themselves, as the growing artisal movements have? And will we (meaning, we as a species) be able to do enough of this sort of thing to keep our idleness from being a breeding ground for all of our usual hatreds and resentments?

I also worry a great deal about the current economic climate in the United States, which has been more and more tilted in the favor of funneling the nation's wealth upward. So I don't know if the middle-class is in "terminal" shape, but...there are some enormous challenges, and current policy seems to me utterly unlikely to meet them.

And then, we have...Roger. Roger, Roger, Roger!

what TV shows, movies, books, comic books, et al. have affected you in terms of your politics/geopolitical world view?

It's interesting: I'm not entirely sure that a lot of the fiction I've experienced has affected my worldview all that much. I suppose it would have to, but I'm not readily coming up with any great examples of books or movies or whatever that made me think, "Wow! What a wonderful expression of liberalism!"

I know, I know: The West Wing. But in a recent re-watch of the first 3.5 seasons of the show (I petered out right about when the slow-leak in Sorkin's balloon, which started in Season Three, finally let all the air out completely in Season Four), I found that the show isn't quite as liberal as most think. Sure, the administration and most of the main characters are Democrats, but many of the Republicans in the show are not depicted as fire-breathing demons, and it's actually pretty surprising how often it's the conservative argument that ends up winning the day. Liberalism is mostly depicted on The West Wing as an idealistic world view, and many times, a character will give a full throated expression of some liberal idea only to have to concede that it's just impossible or unwieldy or unaffordable or something similar.

It's not so much my liberalism that's informed about my approach to fictional properties, then...but my more general sense of right and wrong, and my feel of optimism for our future as a species. That is influenced hugely by a lot of science fiction, such as Star Trek and, yes, Star Wars, even though the latter is more mythic in approach and doesn't depict a "future" at all. But I like tales that suggest that we do have a bright future as a species, that we're not just doomed to do our thing on this planet until something happens and we all die, leaving only a few space probes in the dark as evidence of the things we once did. Peter F. Hamilton is an author who is good at this; so was Iain Banks. I get a bit of this from John Scalzi, too, although his future tends to be more violent.

Have you ever participated in a buycott, rather the opposite of a boycott, in which you buy some product or service to support someone whose values you admire?

I have to confess that I try to do this, but it's not always the easiest thing to do in the world. Often the businesses that are really admirable are hard to access (lots of driving), or they're more expensive (luckily, this is becoming a bit less of a concern for me these days), or...well, that sort of thing. I do feel the need to do more of that, especially since it's so often very easy to not do business with companies whose values I find ugly or abhorrent.

If I'm to believe what I watch on FOX News, the white man feel mighty oppressed in America! Why is that?

Well, by way of a short answer, the world they've always known is changing, and that can be scary. Things are getting difficult that weren't always difficult, and things are getting easy for "The Other" -- whomever your particular "other" happens to be -- in a way that they have not been. Simplistic answer, I know, but I really think that covers it.

What is your opinion of the Presidential Medal of Freedom nominees?

Hmmmm. First, by way of definition (via Wikipedia):

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is—along with the comparable Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress—the highest civilian award in the United States. It recognizes those individuals who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors".[3] The award is not limited to U.S. citizens and, while it is a civilian award, it can also be awarded to military personnel and worn on the uniform.

Here is the roster of this year's honorees:

Ernie Banks
Ben Bradlee
Bill Clinton
Daniel Inouye
Daniel Kahneman
Richard Lugar
Loretta Lynn
Mario Molina
Sally Ride
Bayard Rustin
Arturo Sandoval
Dean Smith
Gloria Steinem
Cordy Tindell "C.T." Vivian
Patricia Wald
Oprah Winfrey

I don't really have a problem with any of these, to be honest. All are important figures (even if I wasn't familiar with a few of the names -- more info on each at WhiteHouse.gov) I don't see anyone on the list whose contributions I consider trite or silly. It's tempting, maybe, to think so of the sports figures, but sport is such a central part of American culture and identity, for better or worse, that to ignore it for things like this would seem odd. It's always hard with awards like this, because frankly, for every person out there, there's another person who can tell you either why they should or should not receive an award like this. These are all remarkable, important Americans, though, as far as I'm concerned.

This is less question than request: could you write a verse of song/poetry about the end of you finishing writing something. The thing I had in mind was for you to write something called "Put a Fork in It" to Beyonce's "Put a Ring on It", but you can pick another title as long as it's to a widely recognizable song.

OK...well, this is weird...huh...well, here goes. And before any of you rip me to pieces over this, I'm coming up with this right now, as I write this, off the top of my head. So yeah, it probably sucks.

(To the tune of the Discovery Channel song)

The book is finished,
The manuscript is done,
The plot is wrapped up,
And man, I had some fun!

I love to write books,
It's what I'm here to do,
Boom de yada, boom de yada,
Boom de yada, boom de yada!

I think the book is good,
And so will all the world,
When it's on the bookshelves
And my flag's unfurled!

All folks will read it,
And fortune will be mine,
Boom de yada, boom de yada
Boom...

sound of needle being dragged across record player. Music stops.

MAN WITH VOICE OF JAMES EARL JONES: Stop singing and write the next book, dumbass.

And with that, folks, I think we're done with Ask Me Anything August 2013! Thanks for playing and being patient, and we'll play again in February!

Something for Thursday

It's fall now, although here in Buffalo we're enduring a couple more days of unseasonably warm weather: upper 70s when we really should be in the upper 60s. Oh well: it's fall, darn it, and I'm gonna wear overalls anyway. It's my vacation and I can do that.

As for music, well, for me the fall is when I feel the strongest sense of "awakening", so I guess one could say that for me, fall is a bit spring-like. That being the case, here is Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, but in the original orchestration for small ensemble. As wonderful as the more commonly-heard version for full orchestra may be, there's something refreshing about hearing the clarity of Copland's original writing.


BTW, this work and recording are also a fine object lesson in how beautiful an instrument the bassoon is.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

What's your preferred work schedule? Do you respond best to Monday-Friday, 9 to 5? Do you like a mix of days, nights? Is working weekends OK or godawful?

The last restaurant company I worked for, not long before I left, rolled out an interesting approach to the management schedule (that has since been abandoned, I believe). Their original approach had been to have managers work five consecutive days, and then always have back-to-back days off (which is always nice; split days off can be a pain), with one extra day off each month. But then they tried this, which I thought worked really nicely for the short time I was there: managers worked four consecutive days and then had their two days off. Obviously, this means that your days off change each week: one week you're off Wednesday-Thursday, then you're off Tuesday-Wednesday, and so on. I liked this because it meant that every five weeks, you would have consecutive Sundays off (Sunday being the busiest day at that restaurant, this was nice), and that every six weeks you would have a weekend off. In restaurants, weekends off are really hard to come by. They can happen, but you'd better be prepared to work a lot of days up to and after the weekend off.

Anyway, what do you like to work?

We will not talk about the shutdown here!

That is all. Ixnay on the utdown-shay!

Son of the Bride of the Return of Potential Cover Art!

Haven't done this in a while...some art that trips my trigger for what the cover of either of the first two Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) books should look like. Maybe.

A nifty paragraph

Reading The Count of Monte Cristo. I really liked this paragraph. #reading #books, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I've been reading The Count of Monte Cristo of late, and I just really liked this particular paragraph. I know I'm reading a translation, but I am greatly enjoying what I'm getting of Dumas's style. It's hard to explain, I must admit...it's like he uses a lot of words, fairly poetically, to state something bluntly.

I am now up to where Edmund Dantes has recovered the treasure and is investigating what has become of the shards of the life that was exploded years ago, when he was unjustly imprisoned. Good stuff!

Sentential Links

Linkage!

:: The Goddess wears her cloak of flowers, the earth is lush, fresh and fertile.

In my patch of the world, green and yellow dominate the landscape. Fields of golden-yellow canola sit side by side with green crops of wheat. It’s a wonderful time to slowly drive the back-roads, just taking the time to admire the vista. (One of my Instagram friends.)

:: What was the Alliance, er, network, thinking? (John Kenneth Muir is blogging his way through Firefly...as well as lots of other good stuff. Gotta remember to read him more often.)

:: A long time ago when I asked a friend, the late Leo Wilson, maitre d’ from P. J. Clarke’s and a character out of the pages of P.G. Wodehouse, what it was about Neary’s he liked so much (Neary’s is a legendary pub in midtown Manhattan), he craned his neck, jutted out his jaw, tugged and pulled at his collar like Rodney Dangerfield (all a part of his repertoire when searching for THE word), then said with a sniff and a huff, “It’s positively civilized!”

:: When I say Miller looks like Sherlock Holmes, I mean he looks like how I pictured my ideal Sherlock Holmes whose image my imagination pieced together out of Sidney Paget’s illustrations for Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, what I gleaned from the stories themselves, and my own wishful thinking about what I’d look like when I grew up: very tall, very lean, with a very high forehead, a very sharp nose, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and…young. (This turns out to be a repost from some months ago, but ignore that.)

:: The schedule prompts the Siren to go public with one of her deepest, most tenaciously held opinions:

Laver's Law applies to cinema. (I am, in all honesty, not entirely sure I understand this post.)

:: No matter how many Star Wars books I've flipped through, I'm always coming across new-to-me behind the scenes photos. They seem to come from a never-ending fountain that bubbles with memories from the galaxy far, far away. Archives are wonderful like that. I can't think of a treasure chest I'd like to explore more. I hope the making of the new sequel trilogy is documented to the very last detail so that 30 years from now we'll still be seeing images we haven't seen before.

:: And the cover copy... Sheesh! This Superman KNOWS he's 50 years old, his powers are "supernatural" in origin, and look! He's losing the drug war! Whatever happened to fact-checking?!

More next week!

Answers the Ninth!

Wow, looks like I may end up dragging this thing out into October, which is a new record for personal futility. Oh well!

Roger had a bunch, as always, so his constitute the bulk of the outstanding answers. So let's get going:

How do you feel about casting folks who aren't the category they portray? I was thinking about Johnny Depp as Tonto, but there are tons of other examples. Should only a gay man play a gay man, e.g. Related question: how do you feel about casting a character that had been traditionally white differently? I'm thinking about making Kingpin, the white villain in the Daredevil comic books as a black man, or the black Asgardian in the Thor movie that made parts of fandom apoplectic.”

I think it can vary from character to character, in a lot of ways. Generally speaking, if a character has a specific ethnicity or ethnic makeup, then surely you can find someone of that ethnicity to do the part. This is why it rankled me a bit to have Benedict Cumberbatch, a white Brit, playing Khan Noonien Singh, an Asian villain, in Star Trek Into Darkness. (And yes, it does kind of bug me after-the-fact that they had a Latino actor, Ricardo Montalban, originate the role -- but that was in 1967, when views on such things were depressingly different.) I could go on and on about that particular casting choice, because it felt like (a) the producers just had to have Khan in their movie, and (b) the producers also just had to have the Flavor of the Month actor in their movie, so there it is. No, I don't think it worked. (And I'm not being dismissive of Cumberbatch's talent in describing him as the Flavor of the Month; he's been a hardworking actor for a while who is now EXPLODING in popularity. That's all.)

Perhaps the worst example of this is, of course, Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, in which he plays the Japanese Mr. Yunioshi in a racial-stereotype performance that has to be seen to be truly appreciated in all its awfulness. Another example that leaps to mind is Louis Jourdan, a French actor, playing "exiled Afghan prince" Kamal Khan in Octopussy. And if you really want to get right down to it, you could even make a case against Patrick Stewart, a Brit who played a Frenchman in Star Trek: The Next Generation, although with that one, the ethnic differences are lessened, and the showrunners oddly completely ignored Jean-Luc Picard's French heritage most of the time after the first season.

On the flip side, I like it when ethnic actors show up in roles that make zero reference to ethnicity at all. I'm thinking of Native American actors Graham Greene and Wes Studi, in Die Hard With a Vengeance and Heat, respectively, for example. But making the Kingpin a black man in Daredevil? Well...I don't know that that's so much of a big deal. Changing the race of a fictional character for a movie doesn't really bug me all that much. Denzel Washington cuts a nice figure in Much Ado About Nothing as Don Pedro, whom I'm sure Shakespeare didn't envision as black. But then, in Shakespeare's time, a man would have played Beatrice.

Where's the line, then? Is it OK for a Japanese actor to play a Chinese character? I'm not sure. I can sure tell when the line is crossed, though.

I'm going to lump the next questions together, because they're all shared topics:

Who will be the first woman President in the US, and when?

When will the first Hispanic be elected President? Any idea on who?

When will the SECOND black person be elected President?

Spitzer and Weiner are running for office. Why shouldn't they, with former SC gov Sanford now a member of Congress?

I wouldn't want to even begin to try picking future Presidents. I know that Washington media loves to talk about who wants to be President and all, but ten years ago I had never even heard of Barack Obama, and ten years before that, the idea that we'd give the keys to another member of the Bush family would have struck me as deeply silly. And just five years before that, you had the Governor of Arkansas giving a disastrously bad speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, which I would have thought would pretty much doom him from national politics forevermore.

Right now, I'd think that Hillary Clinton would be the most likely First Female President. I think we'll have a Hispanic President within twenty years. The second black President? No idea whatsoever. Sorry, but these particular tea leaves are impossible for me to read!

As for Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner, well...that shows how long it's taken me to answer all these questions, because since Roger asked, both have been defeated! In terms of issues and views, I am actually pretty simpatico with both of those fellows, but their personal lives sure brought them down in a hurry. It does strike me as funny that marriage-based peccadilloes only seem to be politically fatal to Democrats. I do follow a couple of Republicans on Twitter who were endlessly crowing about how Democrats could POSSIBLY vote for anyone so VILE as these admitted adulterers -- but when Mark Sanford got elected to Congress, one of them praised South Carolina voters for their "common sense". So who knows.

(By the way, here's my reminder to you all that the phrase "common sense" is one that you should never, ever use.)

Generally speaking, I try to never base voting decisions on candidates' personal lives, unless they involve actual criminal activity. I didn't marry these people, and I've read enough history to know the truth behind the great line of Captain Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly: "Seems to me that every man who's ever had a statue built of him was one kind of sumbitch or another."

Relatedly, though, I am starting to believe in term limits. But that's for another time!

A few more to come, I think!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: You could do a lot worse, when wasting time on YouTube, than watching old clips from Whose Line Is It Anyway. The British version is preferred, but the American version (not the current one, the one with Drew Carey hosting) had a lot of good things going on. Here's a clip I like a lot:


Whose Line's American version seemed almost designed to force the players to have to deal with things going awry, like here when the music stops and yet he's so into the moment that he keeps right on singing.

:: Seen on Tumblr today:

Heh!

:: Want to know what pen you should use? The experts tell you. I'll have to get one -- I don't think I've ever used the one they recommend! (It's an article on cheap pens. We're not talking $350 Pelikan fountain pens, here.)

More next week!

Rule of Acquisition #109

Playing with the new app and filters III, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Ferengi are established as having a culture so built around business and the pursuit of wealth that they are governed by a series of aphorisms called the "Rules of Acquisition". I always like #109:

Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.

I agree. The hell with dignity. I'll take the pie in the face every time.

Answers, the Eighth!

Good Lord, this really got away from me, didn't it? What a strange month, September was. I figured to get ahead, but instead I fell behind! Oops. Anyway, we march on, with the remaining questions posed by a constant (and patient!) anonymous reader:

Do you have "comfort books", that you read when life is tough?

I've actually had to think a bit about this, and it turns out...no, not really. There are quotes from books that I recall in times of stress, but even then, not too many. The words of Gandalf the Grey tend to be very meaningful to me, when he says, in reply to Frodo's wish that the Ring had never come to him, "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide."

I've known people who pick up the Bible or the Qu'ran or other such books when their lives are going through dark periods, but I've honestly never much been one to do that. I also don't very often use my writing as a way of processing the demons, although I have done so in the past (here is an example). I'm not really sure if my reading really reflects the mood of my life's "current events", whatever those may be. Hmmmm...maybe it should.

How does the music you listen to vary with mood or stress?

Would you believe...kinda sorta the same way? Weird, huh?

Although, there are times when I do try to use music as a mood-enhancer, something to shake me out of my inner doldrums. Songs along this line include:

"Hello Goodbye", "Octopus's Garden" -- The Beatles
"Dreams", Van Halen
"Land of Make Believe", Chuck Mangione (the 12-minute liver version, though)
"Human", the Killers (no, the lyrics do not make any sense, but what an infectious song anyway)
"Dancin' in the Street", the cover by David Bowie and Mick Jagger (Shut up, I like it.)

And so on.

When I listen to music while writing, I find that nearly anything works. I don't try to match music to the mood of the work in progress, although sometimes I do that. I might listen to Star Wars or Star Trek music while writing one of the Princesses books, or perhaps some horror music while writing GhostCop, but not always. I like to use music as a way of shutting out the world a bit while I work, but I don't always try to match the music's mood to the writing's mood.

Sometimes, if I'm writing a scary scene, the music's mood can actually create a nifty feeling of incongruity. I like when this happens. It reminds me of Johnny Mathis's "Chances Are", a song which forever creeps me out because of its brilliant use in the abduction-of-Barry scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

More answers to come, I promise!

Something for Thursday

It's my birthday today, so I'm gonna listen to some Star Wars. (Not like I wouldn't listen to some Star Wars on days that are not my birthday, but anyway....)











May the Force be with you, friends!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

How do you get out of slumps? (I'm in one, as it turns out.)

How to guarantee that I'll never watch Breaking Bad

This ought to do it:

I have watched two episodes of Breaking Bad: the pilot, and the one from last week that had everybody rending their teeth and gnashing their garments. All I saw was a bleak, depressing show that made me feel bad about things, but hey, that's just me. No, what really gets my goat is the undertone of nearly everything said about this show of late, that it is so good that if you don't watch it, you are literally -- and not "figuratively" literally, not the new OED literally, but really actually literally -- deficient in some key aspect of your life. I've read tweets, more than once, that said: "I feel sorry for people aren't watching Breaking Bad."

And now comes Kelly Oxford with this. And I love Kelly Oxford. There are fewer funnier people on Twitter, and I loved her recent book, too.

It seems to me that there's an awful lot of commentary that suggests, either through tone or just states it outright, a moral or other kind of failing on the part of those who might have a different view. I know I've been guilty of that, myself. But I'm going to try and stop.

And for the record, I don't watch Breaking Bad, I am not going to watch Breaking Bad, and I am not a f***ing idiot.