easy & inexpensive polenta?

There's a recipe in The Gourmet Slow Cooker, by Lynn Alley, that says 3 cups water, 1 cup polenta, 1 teaspoon salt--cover and cook on high for 1.5 hours stirring once or twice.

According to a quick internet search, stone-ground corn-meal is ok to use instead of genuine polenta.

If this works, I've found the killer app for the crockpot.

peanut-butter oatmeal cookies

Current recipe--I'm still experimenting. My attempt to make cookies relatively more healthy.

Cream together:

• 1/2 cup peanut butter (natural, i.e. only peanuts)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup orange juice

Combine, and add to above:

• 1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Add

• 1 cup chocolate chips (= 6 oz)
  

OR

• 1 cup raisins soaked in orange juice.

Stir in:

• 1-1/2 cups oats

Drop by tablespoons onto buttered cookie sheet. Squish down with a fork.
Bake @ 350 degrees F about 15 minutes.

A long Friday at Readercon

After reminding everybody in my writing group about it last winter, I missed the deadline to register for Readercon at the early-bird rate. Unemployment hit in early May: I decided not to register at the $50 rate. Besides, my family had so much fun at Arisia in January, I knew we'd be going back there next year.

But I thought I'd go to the free Thursday night activities. Only Thursday morning, I was in Wakefield for a job interview. By Thursday night I was too sleepy to drive. I looked at the one-day prices, and the schedule for Friday. It sounded like it could be very informative to just go for that one day.

The next morning I was still uncertain whether to spend the $45 it would cost ($35 for registration, at least $10 in gasoline to drive there). And also whether to take a day away from the job-search.

In the shower, I reasoned: One of my main goals is to write my novels well and get them published. These lectures and panels will probably help me with that goal. Then I should go to it, even though I didn't register in time for the less expensive rate.

My sweet husband agreed to stay with the kids for another day. I drove down to Burlington. The great thing about Readercon, from the point of view of one who has to drive to it, is the adjacent free parking lot. Arisia and Boskone are more accessible from Public Transportation, but that's not really practical from NH.

There was only a short line at registration, so I had no problem getting to the first panel on time.

At 10 am there were two panels that sounded interesting: In Salon F, a talk on the Four Categories of Fantasy, and in the ME/CT room Robert Sawyer was going to talk about his new Web based pilot for the CBC on "SF as a Mirror for Reality", and invite the audience to contribute ideas. Well I'm into Web stuff and new media, but I thought there might be less expert and useful information in some sort of audience participation thing, so I went to the talk on the Four Categories of Fantasy. I've written some fantasy. I might write more. I thought it might be helpful.

The talk was very erudite and literary. The divisions of the 4 categories sounded like a good idea:

1. portal, where normal people enter a panel to a fantastic world, like The Lion, The Witch And the Wardrobe.
   
2. immersive, where the characters live in the fantasy world and see it as normal. Like The Hobbit.
3. intrusion, where the fantasy elements come into the real world, like, Interview with a Vampire.
4. liminal. This is less clear, but seems to me to be one in which the fantasy element was ambiguous. Kind of like things disappearing in the fog when you never do have clear evidence of a monster grabbing them. I think I've seen old TV shows where a character had a particular magic quality, but the magic could also be explained away as coincidence or something. Nanny and the Professor? I wonder if Radar's abilities in MASH would qualify. Even though his skills were based on those of an actual person.
   

But other than that, they lost me. There was a lot of talk with words like "teleological" and so on. I kept trying to pay attention. I kept failing. Do I need more caffeine? I asked myself. Do I need ritalin? Finally, I decided I'd spent too much money to sit it through out of politeness.

I left and went to Sawyer's panel, which was entertaining and interesting. I was sorry I missed the beginning.

At noon I went to a panel on the Sycamore Hill Writing workshop. It looked like a lot of the writers who'd been at least once to this workshop came to Readercon. They were spread out across the front of the room--about a dozen of them. As I'm in a monthly writing group, it is of interest to hear how other groups of writers help each other with writing. The panel was relatively useful in that vein, and amusing in its anecdotes, and in the way the panelists teased and interacted with each other.

At 1pm there was a panel on "Transcending Your Influences." I think it was a good panel because Ellen Kushner was such a good moderator. She kept the participants on topic, and asked them good interview questions: What were your influences? When did you turn the corner in escaping imitation? etc. She had quite a variety of personalities to keep in line, which kept things lively.

James Morrow talked about being billed as "influenced by Kurt Vonnegut" in his early works, and how it got to annoy him. He also said it was gratifying to read reviews of new writers who are described as being "influenced by James Morrow". It's a good sign you've arrived.

I made a note to read something by James Morrow. I like Kurt Vonnegut, and I liked the way Morrow talked.

The 2pm talk on "Consciousness, Free-Will, Evolution" was a live equivalent of the old fashioned speculative essay, with a break for a very interesting 7-minute introduction to Spinoza. The main speaker tied in particle physics and neuroscience for an explanation of subjectivity and consciousness. At the end, I said to the woman sitting next to me, "He lost me pretty early, but it was very entertaining." She agreed.

At 3pm I went to a panel on Writers Groups and Writers. I actually managed to meet someone I knew there--I sat next to Janet, who is in my writing group. The panel there gave some reasonable advice and amusing anectdotes. One member of the panel teaches writing, and has directed plays and written plays and screenplays and stories. I asked her if I should give my screenplay to my regular writing group or find a screenwriting group. She said the format for plays and screenplays is so different that it makes sense to find people who understand screenplays to critique it.

Janet and I compared schedules for the rest of the day. We'd each chosen a different panel for each remaining slot. She was staying in the same room for the 4pm talk on The Influences of Blade Runner. It sounded very intriguing. At the very least, I thought it would be fun to listen to people talk about Blade Runner. But it was given at the same time as a panel called "Objects in the Room may be Scarier than They Appear", which seemed to be about how to write details about objects in stories to give them significance and add to the suspense or creepiness. I don't write horror, but it still sounded more useful in learning the craft of writing. So I decided to go to that instead of to the talk that I thought would be more fun. Wrong decision.

The "Objects" panelists said that an object should only be in a story if it's going to be used, or is very important, for example, in illustrating a character. Fair enough.

My problem is that "illustrating a character" leaves a very large loophole of ambiguity. Dickens will wax on and on about the contents of a character's room, but I know we can't get away with that any more. Nor do I wish to. The panel wasn't able to offer any rules other than to use your instinct to decide on whether to include something. That, and write to the end and then prune out what wasn't needed. Reasonable advice, but I was hoping for more techniques, heuristics, illustrations from actual stories. Illustrations on how to make an object scary.

I'd always thought one of my weaknesses is in deciding how much detail to paint in a scene. So, at the question period, I asked how you find the right level between Dickens and people just interacting in a white nothingness.

The quantity of details Dickens uses is too high, one of the panelists agreed, with some amusing images to back him up.

"But how do you know what's the right amount?" I asked.

"Less is more," they said. "Kill your darlings." Really new advice.

"But I think my problem is the other extreme," I said. "If I write all dialog and no descriptions, should I just give up and write screenplays?"

I'd become a persistent questioner. That horrible annoyance of question periods. Bad Margie. But I'd spent my $35, I was missing the Blade Runner talk, and I wanted to learn something.

Objects, I thought. This panel is on objects in stories. What other advice with respect to objects could they give? So after someone else had a turn, I raised my hand and tried to ask a question that seemed closer to what was implied in the panel's title.

"What about a red herring?" I asked. "Like in a mystery. If there was one object of significance, and you wanted to disguise it among other objects, how would you do that?"

"I wouldn't know how," said one panelist, and they went on to the next question.

For this, I missed a fun discussion of Blade Runner. Janet said she'd go to it. If you're reading this, Janet, how did that go?

At 5pm I went to "A Tale of Two Disciplines" where panelists discussed the joys of connecting areas of study, and the need to fight against the academic bureaucracy's tendency to divide them. Several said they started writing SF as a means of combining disciplines. One of them said the best ideas for sf stories come from combining two disciplines that may seem to be the most difficult to connect.

At 6pm I went to a panel labelled "If All Men Were Tolerant...How would you shock your sister?" In part, I went to hear Celia Tan, whom I've heard give hilarious readings at Arisia, and who has a clear fun way of speaking when on a panel. I suppose I was also hoping to hear something that might be a bit shocking. There was some discussion of the satirycal Obama New Yorker cover. Barry Maltzberg complained that it's just the stupid liberals who can't stand to win, trying to shoot themselves and lose an election that they would otherwise be set up to win. Maltzberg also complained about the Thomas Disch video that was to be shown later that night. That is too shocking, he said. It is too close to his death. It is wrong to take his greatness and pathologize him.

At 7pm I went to "Economics as the S in SF".
The panelists just didn't explain very much about economics or SF. They didn't go deeply into anything, aside from a decent discussion as to what lay behind the monetary system. I was hoping to hear a good analysis of novels like Pohl & Kornbluth's The Space Merchants or hear of new titles and how some novel postulated an economic system or event and created a society from it. Someone asked about The Space Merchants, and they said, "Good example," but didn't elaborate as to why. I wanted to ask them to compare The Space Merchant's society to that of Ursula K LeGuin's The Dispossessed, but what was the point? I don't even think they discussed the John Brunner novel that was in the blurb.

At 8pm there was a small group in a big room listening to a discussion on the personal essay. It was nice hearing the personal situations that led the various fiction authors to turn to the personal essay. (Or, in Judith Moffet's case, to be about to turn to it--she's started to write about the birds and other fauna about her rural home.)

At the question period I asked them to compare the personal essay to blogs. Of course, I had in mind that I like to blog about the sort of topics that would go into a personal essay, but I prefer stories to be in more formal containers.
Panelists praised the formal constraints of a proper essay and dismissed the blog as allowing too much immediacy and spelling errors and lack of editing.

I nodded meekly, thinking, "but I try to edit it." Several bloggers in the audience didn't take it so meekly. Farrah Mendelsohn defended the artistic merit of the blog she had kept for a few years, and the value it had had to her readers and herself. Another blogger had a similar comment. The panelists said, we're not saying blogs are bad, just that they don't have the formal constraints of an essay. Tom Purdon, who was on the panel, said he contributed entries to Asimov's forums, but, as a professional writer, always felt an obligation to carefully edit his words, no matter in what format they were to appear.

I was glad I'd asked a question that got people animated.

At 9pm I went to the panel that was comparing translations from the first page of Zemyatin's novel We. I was glad they had a native Russian speaker on the panel, as well as someone else who had done Russian translations. The other two panelists also had good input as to the philosophy of translating. There was a handout for this talk--a grid in which 4 translator's versions were compared side by side. I wondered which one I had read in paperback from the library years ago--certainly not the most recent one, which, in all but one case, anyway, turned out to be the least favorite.

After that I stuck around to go to the "Meet the Prose" party. It had sounded fun--the authors were going to have sheets of stickers with a line or two from their works. We plebians were to be given sheets of wax paper with which to collect the stickers, and then be able to rearrange the words, kind of like in the refrigerator magnet poetry game.

The start of the party was running late. I watched the awarding of the "Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award" It seemed in line with having a dead guest of honor. This award was to a dead sf writer who'd been forgotten for many years but shouldn't have been, because his work was Really Really Great. Barry Malzberg, in announcing the award, said that it didn't have to go to a dead writer, but that no living writer would want it.

I looked around for refreshments, saw only a cash bar. I wondered what kind of a goyishe definition of the word "party" meant a cash bar and no food. But I thought it would still be fun to get all the stickers and put them together. Then they announced that they had forgotten to obtain the wax paper for us to hold the stickers. I thought, if I'd known, I could have brought some from home. I also thought, don't they have volunteers? Aren't there grocery stores in Burlington? Couldn't they have sent someone out to buy some?

So I walked around collecting stickers. That was fun. It was interesting to read the bit of a story, and sometimes ask the author about an intriguing line, or complement him or her on one that made a pithy or amusing point. I met a few French-Canadian authors who said they wrote in English first, even though they had been raised in French. I had some nice conversations with people. The sticker thing was a good way to get people to talk and mingle.

I only wish I'd had a reasonable place to put them. I started with my plastic badge, but it got full. Then I reasoned that t-shirts often have messages on them anyway, so I started to collect them on my t-shirt. I was hoping that it would be easier to pull them off and re-stick them from the cloth than it would be from paper. People at the party seemed to think it was some kind of wild statement to be decorating my shirt like that. I could only compare this crowd to that at Arisia, where stickers on a t-shirt would be the weakest sort of personal statement.

It seems like Arisia has an unstated purpose as a place for the different drummer types to be able to express themselves in wild exhibitionist ways in an friendly accepting environment.

An unstated purpose of Readercon seems to be to let obscure science fiction writers get together and talk about being writers, and maybe meet some of the few people who are actually reading their stories, and try to sell to them and to the small group of other potential readers. That's fine. Because it also drove home the lesson that even if I achieve what I see as an utterly desired milestone of writing success--a story in Analog, a novel actually in print and in the bookstore--it wouldn't be an amazing Nirvana. I'd just be milling around in that room, with an orange stripe on my badge (indicating "participant") instead of a blue one (indicating "attendee").

Gefilte fish jars and Bonne Maman...

...jam jars have interchangeable lids. Instead of keeping a hodge-podge of glass jars for storing leftovers, we save and reuse just those two types. Thus we have containers for large and small amounts of leftovers, and only one set of lids to match for both. The Bonne Maman jars are fairly pretty, and the Gefilte fish jars are nice once the labels are off. They're good for storage because they go straight down--the mouth of the jar is about the same diameter as the jar itself.

Our sugar bowl is a Bonne Maman jar with a red and white gingham lid.

Leftover tomato-lentil sauce, or green split pea soup, goes warm into a big glass gefilte fish jar and seals well enough so that it can be left in the fridge while we eat something else the next day. I think soups and sauces keeps better in glass jars than they do in plastic ones in the refrigerator.

Glass is easier to clean. Not good for lunchboxes, of course.

Rafi, please pose

Here we are at the Smithsonian Air&Space Museum, trying to get a photo of both girls in front of the Kitty Hawk:



Here's the photo:

Butterfly Video

Video of Rafi in the butterfly exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in D.C. late last month:

Robins CSI

At 1am Saturday Rod heard screeching. He wasted a lot of time looking for a mouse in the kitchen. The next morning we saw the robins' nest near the top of the porch staircase.



At the bottom stair was the remains of one baby bird.





On the step nearby to the area under the porch were more feathers--remains of the 2nd baby?

Rod said if only he'd known, he could have turned on the light and scared the predator away. A day later he said, if the nest was vulnerable, the predator would have just come back, eventually.

The robins had a nest in the same place and raised two broods from it last summer. This brood was the second one of this summer.

Help Iraqi Refugees

parallel universe list

List of phenomena explainable by the existence of parallel universes:

• socks from the dryer
  
• where flies go after you don't manage to slap them
• the amount of sand that can be shaken out of a small child's shoe
  

robins

There's a nest of robins over our porch-door. When we open the door, the parent robin nearly always flies away.

My husband got curious and tried to look at the baby robins by holding up a mirror near the nest. The babies poked their heads out and begged for food.

At what point in their development do birds develop the natural fear of strangers?

Now we love our '97 corolla

A google search for "97 corolla MPG" turns up 35 or even 31 MPG highway for the automatic transmission model.

When I was commuting 40 miles to and from work along I93, I calculated a rough estimate of 37 MPG. On a recent trip to Virginia, my husband said he thought he got 40 MPG. On the drive back, we filled up the tank, drove 84 miles, then topped off the tank. 1.7 gallons brought it back to full.

I admit, when we first got the car, I missed my old zippy '89 Civic (Laguna gold, my first new car.) But now we're very happy with our dull green corolla.

Intergenerational sociolinguistics at the supermarket this morning

The only way to get through the soda aisle was to push my cart between the shelf where a young man was stocking soda bottles and his pallet of bottles.
I waited until a point where I thought it would be the least interruption. "Excuse me," I said, as I pushed my cart through.
"How are you today?" he said without warmth.
Is that what people say now instead of 'excuse me'? I wondered. But I had to reply, "Fine. How are you today?" That's is the minimum response my imprinting considers polite. I found myself saying it as quickly as possible, and not being surprised--though I was still slightly disappointed--when he didn't follow up with the similar minimum 'Fine, thank you'.

I wondered how far 'How are you?' has devolved. Its words haven't yet reached the same artifact status as those in 'How do you do?', which I've often noticed trips up foreigners who understand English but haven't yet learned that it's just a polite phrase spoken at introductions. The only possible verbal response to 'How do you do?' is to repeat (with slightly different emphasis) 'How do you do?'

But 'How do you do?' must originally have meant something like 'How are you?'

At the checkout, I have two cloth bags. They must put the rest of my groceries in plastic. The young woman bagging the groceries asks, "Do you want your milk in a bag?"
"Yes," I reply. "Milk sometimes leaks."
She gives the slight grimace that baggers always give when I make that reply to that question.
I ask, "Did I lose my ecology points for that?"
She asks "What?"
I repeat the question and she smiles.
It occurs to me that using 'ecology' as an adjective in that way places me back in the '70's or '80's. Nowadays, people would use the adjective 'green' instead.

You try arguing with a 4-year old

I see Rafi's eyelids fluttering, so I bend over and give her a kiss.
"Good morning," I say. "You're a beautiful little girl."
"Are we gonna die?" she asks.
I've heard this before. "Not today," I say.
"Not today?"
"Not this year."
"Not this year?"
"Not for a long long time."
"When? In what month are we going to die?"
"Nobody knows. Nobody knows when they're going to die, but I wouldn't worry about it."
"You wouldn't worry about it? Well, I would."

I give up, leave the room, tell my husband. "I can't argue with that."
"'Because I said so,'" says my husband. "People would be happier if they could accept it. But not from their politicians."

polyandry is better for raising children

With polygyny, you have more children than one man can support. With two husbands and one wife, you have no more children than one woman can produce, but you have the earning and nurturing power of three adults to raise them.

Three adults can trade off sitting up with a sick child or a sleepless baby. They can take turns babysitting and let the other two go out for a night of adult entertainment.

From a kid's point of view, there's always a dad to help you with your math or show you how to throw a football. And your mom is probably more cheerful and relaxed than other moms.

This could be a solution to middle class financial stress. For those of us making under $100 grand, it should not only be legal, but encouraged.

cyrus broohaha

For heaven's sake, it's Vanity Fair, not Playboy. If Annie Leibowitz asks you to pose nude, you pose nude. She's Annie Leibovitz. That's that.

May Day

My Daytimers says today is the National Day of Prayer(USA), Yom Hashoah, and Ascension Day.

When I was a kid, May 1 was Law Day in the USA. I remember going with my class to visit a courtroom and get a lesson from a judge. How did we go from honoring the law to prayer? This is a disturbing trend.

Arise, you prisoners of starvation...

Man is chew it z

I can't remember if I ever noticed it before: that's 4 English words in a row, followed by a z.

This year, I boycotted all products containing cottonseed oil.
If they want their customers to live longer and continue buying their food, they'll start using healthier ingredients. Why not olive or safflower oil?

Passover is the Brigadoon of dishes.

We only have one week a year to break our passover dishes.
If you're looking for dishes from the 1950's, 60's, 70's, advertise in Jewish publications.

It can be a problem if we buy a food processor or electric kettle to use only on passover and it breaks the second week we use it. It would be difficult to take it back to the store after a year and say we'd only used it for two weeks before it broke.

heat the tub

In these chilly northern climes, why don't we have heated bathtubs? Then you could relax and read an entire New Yorker. A child could play with all her boats and rubber duckies and cups, and only come out for bedtime or when her mommy says, "You're turning into a prune!"

china trade

How is the economic stimulus package supposed to work if most of the stuff we buy is Chinese? Why not give out coupons for American goods or services? Is this a Chinese-economy stimulus package?

Considering how their ramped-up factory production increases their incentive to dig coal out of the most dangerous and deadly mines on Earth, and burn it in inefficient power plants, polluting their atmosphere, the lungs of their own people and increasing global warming as a whole, shouldn't we reconsider this most-favored-nation trade status?

Sure, our standard of living has gone up by our ability to buy cheap goods, but is all this shoddy junk really improving the quality of our lives? Why not fewer things that are appreciated more? Why not quality items good enough to fix, or good enough not to break in the first place?

We need to look into our own culture for ways to improve the environment. For example, why do we need to buy children new toys? I know my small children were happy to get used toys from their older cousins. But there's a cultural taboo against wrapping up a already-played-with toy, even an already-read book (still in good condition!) and giving it to a child for a birthday. Even Christmas toy drives for needy children insist on brand new toys. That increases the amount of junk in our houses, our needlessly trashed items, the purchase of Chinese-made goods and ultimately global warming.

If you read stories of older times, you can see that this taboo didn't use to exist. It's like we're in the Brave New World where all are subscribed to the slogan 'Ending is Better than Mending'.

not a sonnet

She has a big face,
Like Hello Kitty,
And like her Daddy,
But much, much cuter.

Her name is Rafi.
Her laugh is magic.
She makes me happy.
She is four years old.

POW's awaiting end of War on Evil

Someone should write an article about the oldest POW in the U.S. facility in Guantanamo: A slumlord who was imprisoned there during President Johnson's declared War on Poverty. We still haven't won that war, either, so he is yet to be released.

Obama scandal

A real scandal about Obama would be if we found out he was better at speeches than debates because he is ghost-written. By his wife, possibly, or by a leprechaun.

spider gone

It's been a week since I've seen the spider. There last Thursday, gone Friday morning. I guess the cleaning guy finally did a thorough mopping. No web, no ant carcasses, no spider.

Googling myself -- I've been quoted!

I wasted a lot of time the other night googling myself because Rodrigo said he'd found me quoted on the Internet. He said he googles me now and then.

In December, I was interviewed by a reporter at a talk by Bill Richardson in Manchester. I had hopefully googled myself a few days after, but I didn't find myself quoted anywhere. I gave up and forgot about it. Apparently, I did make it into an article.

What I read seemed a little odd compared to what I remembered saying. I thought I'd been really articulate, having clarified my New Hampshire voter opinion in a blog entry a few days before. The quote didn't seem to be what I mainly said, but it wasn't a misquote. At most, a paraphrase of something I'd said. And, I guess, the point that the reporter was after.

First, I thought it was just on an web-only news service, but then I found that the piece was picked up by various newspapers, including the Miami Herald and the Cape Code Times.

Not that it matters any more. The primary's over. Still, it was fun to be in a state with a first-in-the-nation primary. It made me feel so important for a while, and I noticed others getting energized about voting. It would be good to rotate the privilege around, and give citizens of other small states a similar chance.

Back to googling: For the most part, "Margery Harrison" brings up a lot of genealogical records.

It's much more fun to do an image search on "Margie Harrison". She was definitely not me, and probably a pseudonym, but I'd love to know what happened to her.

News media ignoring actual NH result

There's such a big splash about Hillary beating Obama in the NH primary. I suppose her edge is a nice psychological victory, but if you look at the results in terms of delegates--which is what the primaries are about--they each got 9 delegates from NH. That makes the results, actually, a tie.

--written by one of the 13,245 voters who earned Richardson zero delegates.