Let's go fly a...oh, you know.

Let's go fly a...oh, you know., originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Well, I could blog some stuff for you folks. Or I could do stuff like hang out on an Atlantic beach with my family, flying a kite that looks like a shark.

Yeah. See ya! (Vacation ends Saturday, normal life resumes Sunday, work resumes Monday. 'Day Job' work, that is. I've been writing this whole time.)

But anyway...see ya!

Astronaut View of Fires in Colorado

Astronaut View of Fires in Colorado, originally uploaded by NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

Wow. That is all.

Telegram from the Sea

Sunset over Delaware Bay, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

STILL VACATIONING STOP NOT MUCH LOOKING FORWARD TO RETURN STOP RUM EVERY DAY STOP THE OCEAN CALLS ME STOP BURY MY HEART HERE STOP

A Dispatch from the Coast

HAVING GREAT TIME

WISH YOU WERE

A Very Public Service Message

Blogging in this space, which has been kinda sporadic anyway, will be even more sporadic over the next week, because I am on vacation. I'll probably still have some stuff up, but don't hold your breath.

And now for something completely different:

Something for Thursday

Oh crap, it's Thursday! And in my time zone, it still is, for another 19 minutes. Ha! Sorry to drop the ball so completely, but I'm in "Vacation Mode" at work and in my head and I'm still trying to extract this frakking book from my head. I know where the book is going, but I'm well into the third (and final) act and I've got quite the juggling act going on, and I'm finding it in general a bit of a struggle to make sure everything happens that's supposed to. Plus I've got my Muse, doing his drive-by visits, which are always helpful but also a bit vexing as I try to figure out how to use what he's giving me.

But anyway, enough whining. Here are the End Titles from Hook, by John Williams. This very fine score has pretty much disappeared except from the consciousnesses of devoted film music fans by virtue of the movie being, well, not all that good.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Rap music: yay or nay?

Toys from the FUTURE!!!

electronic entertainment 1979_0005, originally uploaded by retro-space.

This Retrospace photo really takes me back. The one toy I remember not owning from childhood that to this day I still kinda-sorta want is the Big Trak, the rover-vehicle thing in the upper left corner. See that keypad on the back? You used that to load a program of movements, and then the Big Trak would take off, executing the turns you programmed. And it made cool laser noises, too. I always loved the cut of that thing's jib.

And that kid in the lower right, sitting in that seat-thing? I didn't have the seat-thing, but I had the spaceman helmet and air tank that he's wearing. Cool stuff for a budding space dude. Zap! Pow!

Writing is like this, installment # 5748

Here's another metaphor for what writing is like. Take the wonderful opening scene (sorry, I can't embed the video) from Love Actually (a movie about which, if you say bad things, I will fight you -- that's no lie). Billy Mack, our drugged out singer, is recording a cover version of a classic oldie but with the lyrics 'repurposed' for Christmastime. OK? So he's recording, and it takes several takes because he keeps getting it wrong. He gets more and more frustrated with himself, culminating in one of the best self-directed bits of profanity in movie history.

But then, he buckles down, dials in, and he nails it. And he knows it, he knows he's nailed it, so he keeps going, getting into the moment. And he's really creating something now! He's got it!

And then, the realization hits him, and at the 1:54 mark in the video, he says to his producer, "This is shit, isn't it?"

Even when it's going great, you're never far from the conviction that you're still producing tripe and treacle. You're never far from stopping typing, staring at the screen, and saying, "This is shit, isn't it?"

That's what writing is like.

One doesn't see too many job listings for executioners these days

I'm trying to wrap my head around this story. A convicted murderer is about to go free in Indiana. The case has never been in doubt; this isn't a case of innocence-by-DNA. The woman confessed to the crime, and there has never been any challenge to her conviction. The sentence, however, was: the woman was sentenced to death. But she was only 16 at the time.

Murderers are...well, they're murderers, and I struggle with my notion of how best to deal with them. I honestly do believe in rehabilitation and maybe even redemption, and this woman has served 27 years in prison. Is she rehabilitated? I guess that's not really for me to say. It's a tough question. But the idea of sentencing someone to die for a crime -- and this one, involving a butcher knife and more than 30 stab wounds, is pretty heinous -- before they're old enough to have even most of the privileges our society reserves for 'adults' seems extreme.

And then I read further in the article and I learn that until 1988, you could be sentenced to death in Indiana as young as ten years old.

Many years ago, I believed in the death penalty. It seemed pretty clear to me: murderers should be executed. Eye for an eye, and all that. But I changed my mind when Ted Bundy was executed.

If you were to draw up a list of every murderer in the history of the human species, and rank them in order of who most deserved the death penalty, I think there's a pretty good chance that Ted Bundy would wind up in the top ten. He is among the very worst things our species has ever produced. But I've never forgotten the news footage of his execution, during which a raucous and celebratory crowd was gathered outside the prison, brandishing hand-painted signs that said things like "Barbecue Ted" and "Fry Bundy Fry". Those images were like a bucket of cold water, thrown upon me. The state was killing a human being, and there were folks outside the place where it was happening. And they were having a tailgate party.

I haven't had much confidence in the moral underpinnings of the death penalty since then.

In my lifetime, at least one state maintained the legal authority to execute ten-year-old children. The mind reels.

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome (Russian edition)

Oddities and Awesome abound! This week, a trio of Russian stuff.

:: The first human to travel in space, Yuri Gagarin, died several years after his flight in a plane crash, the details of which have never really been made clear...until now. I continue to be amazed, this many years later and what with the news today, by humanity's need for secrecy.

:: Today is the 50th anniversary of the first human female space flight. I've never understood why it took the United States more than two decades to get a woman into space. (Although, in more cynical moments, I think I do understand it, but I don't like the implication.)

:: Finally, a more frivolous and non-space related item. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is mad at Vladimir Putin. I've never been able to figure Vladimir Putin out (I always get this vague sense that he's the James Bond supervillain that Dick Cheney always wanted to be), but the fact that he has angered the Patriots makes me happy.

More next week!

This week's potential cover art

I might as well make this a quasi-regular thing, huh?

OK, that's it for now, lest I get carried away. Time to get back to writing. This week was a bit rough in terms of pure output, mainly because I'm into the hard part of the book, the part that I've been entrusting to The Muse all along, the "I'll cross that bridge when I get to it" part. Well, I'm at the bridge now. Time to cross it, armed with the little scraps of Burger King wrappers, old coffee cups, and Post-It notes that The Muse has occasionally seen fit to huck out the window of his Dodge Dart at me.

Back at it!

From the Books: "Me the People"

I've recently read a book called Me the People: One Man's Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America, by Kevin Bleyer. Mr. Bleyer is, among other things, one of the writers for The Daily Show, which means that this book is a mixture of humor and serious discussion, with the occasional problem that at times it's difficult to separate the two. But it still present a fascinating look at the process by which the Founding Fathers arrived at the Constitution, and what kinds of problems exist in trying to force a modern, technological superpower's society on a governmental structure created by a bunch of agrarian former colonists more than two hundred years ago.

In all honesty, I've never been much for idolatry of the Constitution. I recently had a friend try to draw me into a conversation on gun control, and I strongly resisted, not particularly wanting to venture down that particular garden path, well, ever. But my friend did ask me this: "Well, you believe in the Constitution, don't you?" That struck me as an interesting question, because, well, what does it mean?

Do I believe in the Constitution? I suppose so, in that I believe that we have a government that is structured according to the provisions contained within the Constitution's pages. And that's about all that I believe about it. I don't believe that there is anything especially sacred about the Constitution, and I don't believe that the Constitution represents some kind of moment when we rose to greatness. In truth, the Constitution is a muddled mess of a document, and the government it creates isn't so much a brilliantly constructed Machine of Democracy as a hodge-podge, ramshackle mess of compromises with difficulties exacerbated by some really poor writing.

When discussing various issues, I try to never get wrapped up in talking about what "the Founding Fathers wanted", for a number of reasons. To begin with, the Constitution simply does not represent any kind of 'consensus' on the part of the Founding Fathers. A lot of them disliked the resulting document and simply accepted it as "the best thing we're likely to end up with". When the biggest matter of consensus arising from the Constitutional Convention was a general sense of "Meh, this was the best we could do, folks", the idea of ascribing any particular thought or philosophy to "the Founding Fathers" doesn't make much sense. Heck, Thomas Jefferson even thought that we should scrap the entire thing after a few decades and take another whack at it. As far as I can see, referring to "what the Founding Fathers wanted" is a reference to nothing at all, because they all wanted different things.

More importantly, though, is that a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. The United States Constitution was adopted 224 years ago. Even if there really was some kind of consensus as to what the FF's wanted, why should that even matter now? Maybe because it's our own history, but the time of the FFs was a lot longer ago than I think we tend to realize, and I'm increasingly of the view that keeping our governmental structures rigidly organized according to the thoughts of people who lived and died that long ago may not be a great idea. Consider the following list of things, and consider that FFs lived closer to these things, time-wise, than they did to us:

Queen Elizabeth I
William Shakespeare
The defeat of the Spanish Armada
Johannes Kepler
Nostradamus
Suleiman the Magnificent
Cervantes
Ben Jonson

Did the FFs intend for their Constitution to still be running the show 224 years later? I have no idea. But I suspect they'd be a bit baffled by the lip service that is paid to that old document these days, and it says something to me that they included a mechanism for changing the Constitution for a reason.

Here's how Bleyer sums things up:

Now we understand how it all happened -- or rather, almost didn't.

The Constitution wasn't a "Miracle at Philadelphia" written by "an assembly of demigods". On the contrary; what began as a measured, deliberate effort to rescue a beleaguered country became a perpetual unresolved-motion machine -- a maddening cycle of nonbinding votes by a parade of toothless committees, marked by fits and starts, fights and "full stops", conducted by a combative group of exhausted, drunken, broke, petty, partisan, scheming, squabbling, bloviating, backstabbing, grandstanding, godforsaken, posturing, restless, cow-tipping, homesick, cloistered, claustrophobic, sensory-deprived, under-oxygenated, fed-up, talked-out, overheated delegates so distraught and despairing they threatened violence, secession, foreign allegiance, even prayer -- and concluded, for those who didn't abandon the proceedings altogether, with as much premeditation and forethought as a game of musical chairs: the last, least abhorrent, mutually-somewhat-acceptable idea on the table when the music stopped -- or the heat became too unbearable, or the liquor too strong, or the rioting too loud, or the pressure too intense, or the company too loathsome, or the wigs too uncomfortable, or the patience too thin -- became the law of the land. As much the product of an "assembly of demigods" as a confederacy of dunces.

From page one, the Constitution is, by its own admission, a compromise. It is what you get when you drink beer for breakfast.

Or as Ben Franklin put it as the Convention ended: "Thus I consent to this Constitution, because I expect no better."

If they thought it stank, why should we pretend that it smells of roses and lavender?

Something for Thursday

A repeat, this -- maybe more than a few times even -- but it's a work I come back to at least once a year. Here is one of the finest choral pieces I know, "Shenandoah".


It's lovely enough, until about the 1:30 mark, when the clouds part and....

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Name a store that you wish still existed, and why!

Strange brew! (And cold.)

So I've been intrigued for a while about the idea of cold-brewing coffee. This is a method whereby one extracts the flavors and oils from coffee not with hot water, but with cold. (Duh!) Basically, you mix ground coffee and cold water and let it sit out, at room temperature, for a long time: 12 to 24 hours. Then you strain out the coffee, resulting in a concentrated coffee extract that, because it was done at a low temperature, cuts down on the coffee's acidity.

So I acquired a really nice glass bottle, hunted around for recipes (eventually settling on this one), and away I went! Here's the pictorial tale.

First, I measure out coffee: 4.5 oz of it. Which turns out to be quite a bit of coffee.


Into the bottle goes the coffee. Most recipes I've looked at say to use a fairly coarse grind, since the long steeping time will be used and since it'll be easier to strain it out later on.


Then, into the bottle goes the water: 3.5 cups of it.


This results in a pretty gross-looking sludge. Don't worry! This is normal.


Now came the waiting game. I did the prep part of the job at 4:30 in the afternoon, and I did the straining around 8:00 the next morning.

Straining turned out to be...problematic. The recipe I used said to simply put a standard paper coffee filter into a fine-mesh strainer and pour the sludge through there, slowly, and let it drain into a bowl. The problem is that when I did this, the paper filter clogged up almost immediately; the initial slow pour of coffee slowed in minutes to a slow drip, and then stopped altogether. I tried another filter, and the same thing happened. This was a problem, obviously. So I dispensed with the paper filters: I poured the coffee mixture through the fine-mesh strainer into the bowl, and then, after cleaning the glass bottle, I strained the coffee again, through the same strainer, back into the glass bottle.

The result? Here's my coffee concentrate, after double-straining and several hours of refrigeration.


Yes, it's only half the bottle. But it is, after all, a concentrate, so you're not going to use that stuff straight. (Well, I suppose you could, if you wanted to. It's your nervous system, folks. I'm not the bossa you!) The idea is to dilute the coffee concentrate, with whatever it is that you typically like. You could use water, I suppose, but that seems goofy. I used milk, in equal portions. Here's what I ended up with:


And then:


I have to tell you: this is really pretty tasty. In the future I think I'll use the half-size tumbler for this, though; a glass that size is a lot of this stuff to drink at once. And I'm kind of wondering if I don't need to use one percent milk or maybe even two percent, because we only keep skim milk around, and for this kind of drink, I kind of miss the mouth-feel I get from a little bit of fat content.

And of course, there's a virtual galaxy of flavorings I could add to the mix. On a future iteration, I may well try adding a teaspoon of cinnamon to the coffee during the steeping. And if I get into this in a big way, I might start keeping the finished concentrate in smaller glass bottles (of which I have a few floating around, from commercially-prepared iced tea) so I can start the process over again with my main bottle.

Ah, coffee. You make things possible!

A brief quote about writing

From William Goldman's indispensible book, Which Lie Did I Tell? (More Adventures in the Screen Trade) (salty language alert):

Mr. Ziegler, referred to earlier [Evarts Ziegler, once Goldman's agent], was once told that technology was going to change everything. He shook his head no. "I don't care," he began, "what you say. I don't care if your fucking technology figures out a way to beam movies from the moon directly into our brains." And here he paused a moment before finishing with this: "People are still going to have to tell stories."

Hear, hear.

Sentential Links

Linkage! Some of these are new to me, blogs by folks I've met through Instagram.

:: I’m trying to focus on the things that I want to make habits, to work on finding a less cranky place to come from. Seems a good goal, overall.

:: Their story is still being written. Their possibilities are endless. The future is up for grabs, to take and mold it as they please.

:: But I struggle with the label of bisexual. For me that implies a desire for that particularly womanly taste and scent, the softness of the curves of the female, balanced with a longing for the hardness of males. This is not my experience. I cannot claim “queer” as an identity, as I am objectively “not-queer.” I am ambisexual, uni-sexual, ambiguously sexual…who can say.

I am, in the end, just me. (Aren't we all? Labels are such a pain in the ass...but they make talking about stuff so much easier. Weird.)

:: I woke up with this feeling, a season change is clear in the air. It rained all night, and that's good for the plants, not for my mind, I've been praying, like every day, for our home to be safe, for my cats and dog to be safe when i'm working.

:: Kat Dennings is an almost-perfect choice for Maddy. She is witty and sarcastic, but can turn on the dramatic when the scenes call for a bit of seriousness. Although Maddy is described as only 5’1, Kat’s curves are exactly how I pictured my MC when I wrote her character. (I can't say I haven't pictured Kat Dennings as the older of the two Princesses In SPACE!!! [not the actual title], but I haven't mentally cast her, either, mainly because she's likely unconvincingly old for that part. Alas!)

:: I was the kid that gave her barbies cancer. They had terrible, and rather short lives in my make-believe world. Bad things just happened and I was aware of it.

:: Shakespeare wrote plays, not novels; that is, his works were meant to be seen and heard, not read -- at least not at first. While I prefer live theater, that's more easily said than done for some folks, given travel, time, and/or budgetary considerations. In my experience, then, a well regarded film is preferable to an amateur-ish "Shakespeare in the Park" production. Bad theater, no matter how well intentioned, is just bad theater.

:: My father loved to write crap down. He’d dream up some idea or another, and he’d jot it down in one of a half-dozen little notebooks he used to carry around with him. I remember one time as a kid when I asked him about something, and to answer me he produced one of his older notebooks. Hell, I can’t remember what it was I asked. But I clearly remember him ruffling through page after page of drawings and scribbles, trying to find the answer. He paused on one page, which contained a crude (but surprisingly precise) drawing of a suitcase with two different kinds of wheels on it. “I really should’ve done something about that,” he said, tacitly suggesting he’d scooped the originator’s patent. (At work, I always carry a notepad with me. Always. I have to. If I'm working in one part of the store and I realize I need to cut a piece of material, it's easier to take my measurement on site, jot it down, and go make the cut. That's just one example. Oddly, I don't carry any kind of notepad around when I'm just me, being Joe Blow Writer Dude out and about. This seems odd, but it occurs to me that I rarely have any big writing ideas when I'm out and about being Joe Blow Writer Dude. I've come to a point where The Muse seems to only drive by and chuck shit out the window at me when he knows I'm gonna be right here, ass in chair, banging away on the keyboard.)

:: May I make it clear, please: next time some yahoo proclaims the word of God as a tool of oppression (and/or stupidity), just assume I oppose it. I may not mention it all the time, because that’s what I would be writing about ALL THE TIME. I’m not interested in doing that; it would be boring for me, and quite possibly for you.

More next week!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I saw this candle on Facebook, but without any information as to where it comes from. Which is a bummer, because it's one of the coolest-looking things ever. Imagine burning this in a room as the only light source, and tracking the shifting of the shadows on the walls and ceiling over time.

Again, I have no idea where this is from.

:: Apparently the Swedes have decided to take movie-making about the Vikings into their own hands. Cool!

:: Over the last few years I've had some folks comment on my nice-looking skin...hmmmmm....

More next week!

This means something. This is important.

So The Wife and I took a few hours a couple weeks back to wander the aisles and corridors and back corners and nooks and crannies (but, sadly, no dimly-lit basement!) of the Orchard Park Antique Mall. This wonderful space, of which I've written before, is an old supermarket that was converted to an antique mall when the supermarket built itself a spiffy new location a mile down the road. It's always a great place to kill some time, as I always find something cool there, whether it's something I want to own or something I want to look at. Take, for example, this glowing art deco airplane lamp:

Or the Space Needle cigarette lighter (which is about eight inches tall):

Or the creepiest damned lamps you will ever see, ever, for the rest of your life.

I almost always find something to buy, however. On this trip I snagged a really lovely set of sushi dishes (photos forthcoming, I haven't taken them yet), and, from one of the Used Book cabinets, this bit of movie memorabilia:


If it looks like a plain stiff paper folder, of the kind you used to use in school to keep your class papers in a semi-organized state, it is. But what's neat is that inside the folder are the real goods. See, this is an actual Official Press Kit, issued by Columbia Pictures, for the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition. Inside the folder are a number of items: a synopsis of the movie, a bio of Steven Spielberg (to that point in his life, obviously), and a complete roster of the film's cast and crew. All these are typewritten on regular paper.

In addition to that, there's a brown paper envelope that contains about a dozen black-and-white production still from the film.


Note the Columbia address down in the lower right corner.

I have absolutely no idea on the sequence of events that led to this thing sitting in a cabinet of an antique emporium in Orchard Park, NY, but I've got it now. Huzzah!