family camping on the Cape

I needed to take a vacation before my co-worker went away for a month. I did not want to spend more than the cost of a new Energy Star refrigerator, the item that has been topmost in my future large expenditure plans.

We bought a Coleman Bayside 8 tent for about $160 from Target. It's a roomy 8-person tent that we could stand up in. The four of us could sleep in it with our luggage around us. It wasn't stuffy, like the reasonable small tents I'd slept in before. It would have been nice to have more windows one could see through with the rainfly on, other than the two through the door. With the rainfly off, it is a good screen house. I can envision using it as a refuge from bugs in the backyard. Its best feature is a swinging door, which you can secure with Velcro when you and/or your kids are going in and out frequently. When you're in or out for a while, you can zip it shut like in a normal tent.

Carver

I wanted to visit Plimoth Plantation, so the first night we stayed in Miles Standish State Forest ($14). It was decent, though more of a getaway for the metro-Boston resident or budget-alternative to a hotel than a destination worth crossing state lines for. We were disappointed by trash left around the campground and in our campsite. There was also a lot of electronic noise from fellow campers. We had to listen to baseball until after the supposed quiet time of 10pm. One nice feature was a small pond within view of our campsite, where we could wade or even swim.

Before the trip, I'd looked at websites for different campgrounds near Plymouth MA and on Cape Cod. One of them, "Paine's" in Wellfleet had seemed very snooty. They had families with children segregated into a section separate from the all-grownup parties. After our first hour in Miles Standish listening to whiny and crying children from surrounding sites, I decided they had a point. After my darling child began bawling at the top of her lungs after 10pm, I conceded that our family was no exception.

It takes a while to get used to camping. I woke up in the middle of the night because I was too cold, then was woken too early by five-year-old Rafi. I tried to amuse her with a notebook and pen I fished out of my pocketbook.

"I'll write a story," said Rafi.

"Great," I said, and closed my eyes.

"Mommy, how do you spell 'Once'?"

"O-n-c-e, but I gave you the pen and notebook so you'd let me sleep. Just make up a spelling. It doesn't matter. Please let me sleep."

I closed my eyes.

"Mommy, how do you spell 'upon'?

I was zombie mommy and not in the mood to learn anything. We tubed Plimoth plans and headed for the beach.

Just Off Cape on Dwellable

Brewster

We stayed at the Sweetwater Forest campground in Brewster MA ($32 times 3 nights). It's on a large plot of land that contains a picturesque marsh, sandpit, and pond. There were horses in a privately owned farm in the grounds, but they were not for the campers to ride. There was canoeing and fishing in the pond but not swimming. If you walked out onto the boat dock, you could see large turtles swimming in the pond. I think that's the first time I've seen large turtles in New England, outside of an aquarium.

The campground boasted a miniature golf course, but it was more of a collection of miniature putting greens. No windmill and no kitch--it wasn't proper miniature golf.

The water and electric hookup sites were somewhat close together but landscaped in a pleasant way. The tent/no-hookup sites were slightly more spaced. When we asked to stay an extra night and had to move, we got to stay in the "DLK" site, which was really beautiful--overlooking the pond in one direction and a small playground in another. It was also very secluded. I overheard someone saying "DLK" stood for "David L Klein". A websearch reveals he was a co-owner of the campground, who died in 1996.

We bought a sticker for the national seashore ($45). We went to the Marconi beach and had a great time riding waves in the seaweed. We went to the other two National Seashore beaches in the Provincetown area, but arrived late in the afternoon and found them cold. We drove through P-town with difficulty, and decided we needed to walk or bike there from somewhere else. We looked longingly at art galleries, then drove to the first pizza place on Route 6 that had parking. Very good pizza.

Give Parsons the Emmy

Outstanding Lead Actor In A Comedy Series:

First off, it's cool that four of the nominated actors are on broadcast and I've actually seen three of those four shows. Well, I've encountered The Office while flicking channels, but it was way too creepy for me to watch past a few lines of dialogue, so I can't judge on Steve Carell's nomination.

I do enjoy both Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock and Charlie Sheen in 2 and a half men. They're good actors with great comic timing. But the roles they play are relatively attractive and, as the 2-1/2 men song goes, "manly men".

Jim Parsons has impressed me as an actor who is doing a fine job with an exceptionally difficult role. He manages to balance his portrayal of an innocent, egotistical nerd with obsessive-compulsive issues without making the role either too broadly cartoony or too uncomfortable to watch. He keeps it at a light-comedy level, good characterization, and fun to watch. That must be really hard. He deserves the Emmy.

Outstanding Commercial:

My favorite commercial this past year was the Verizon cell phone commercial about a teenager who got an actual but vicious pony for Christmas, instead of a new Verizon cell phone like her two friends,who are shown commiserating with her, along with the Verizon network personified.

That wasn't among the list of nominees.

Readercon Thursday Goblin Fruit Party

At the open "Launch Party" for the poetry e-zine Goblin Fruit, I met a poet Mary Alexandra Agner, who works with satellite technology at Lincoln Lab. I flipped through her chapbook (new word I learned that night) and thought her poetry was rather good, which was a pleasant surprise for I usually have trouble connecting with modern poetry.

Two women played harp and several women sang. It was pleasant and made me nostalgic for lute music.

I heard a publisher of a print magazine Realms of Fantasy trying to coax an on-line author to publish in print as well. She called an e-zine publisher from across the room to her defense of online over old print media. The e-zine publisher was way more inclined to discuss rather than debate. He and the print publisher had an interesting time comparing experiences and business models. That is, I found the conversation to be very interesting and a kind of a continuation of an interview I'd heard recently on Terry Gross with an editor of Wired magazine who recently published a book called Free, about on-line business models.

Then an acquaintance started talking to me, which pulled me away from my shameless listening in. After figuring out how we knew each other, I looked at my watch. 10 before midnight. Way past my bedtime, and I still had an hour's drive home. Sleepiness thus intruded on my vacation Friday, but I think it was worth it.

world's oldest

Prostitution ought to and will some day be a respected profession, with training, certification, professional societies, and a code of ethics. Like lawyers, mental health workers, and clergy, prostitutes will and should be able to provide clients with legally-protected assurance of confidentiality.

And, no, that won't take the fun out of it. Quite the contrary. These are the Dark Ages.

Thursday night Readercon Panel: Character..Breakthrough..Mind

From 9 to 10 the crowd and I were at a panel discussion called: The Origin of Character in Breakthrough of the Mind. It seemed to be on how characters can run away with a story and do things that the author hadn't planned for them in the first place.

The most interesting anecdote on this was told by Peter Straub. He was writing a story about two families. His purpose was to contrast the life of two boys being raised in different trying environments, one rich and one poor. Across the street from one of the boys lived a cranky old man. The kind of cranky old man always yelling at kids to get off the grass. Eventually the cranky old man turned out to have a very interesting past and story. He took over the novel. The novelist talked about having to throw away pages and pages that didn't belong in the story any more, and that his wife complained, "those were the best pages."

Writers talked about the "gift story" that would show up as inspiration. Ellen Hand had such a story occur to her about 20 years ago. One morning she began to think about a woman who saw Elvis. She started writing at 10 am, finished at 10pm, mailed it off the next day, and it was published. She says that these gift stories occur only once in every eight years or so. The young writer Daryl Gregory said that he's still waiting for his.

The moderator Jim Kelly kept referring to the voice of his subconscious that tells him how to write as "the little guy". Soon the entire panel was referring to their "little guy."

The panel ended with responses to a question as to how to silence the inner critic when the critic suppresses your writing instead of helping you improve it. Some talked of the value of deadlines, so you can tell the critic you don't have time to listen.

Thursday night Readercon 8-9pm

So after last year's exhausting day at readercon, I decided to go just to the free Thursday night this year.

(Actually, my natural cheapness was at work. Soon after I started a new job across the street from the readercon hotel, I checked the website for early registration. It was more than early registration for Arisia, and they don't have the whiz bang costumes and movies and special effects to pay for. And I wasn't sure what I'd be up to in July. Early July is usually a hot sunny time when people go to the beach. That hasn't happened this year, but how were we supposed to know?)

At 8pm I went to a reading by Elaine Isaak. She read from an as-yet-unpublished novel. It has an interesting premise, in that the main character is a barber-surgeon from the Middle Ages. Actual magic occurs, so it is fantasy, not historical fiction. I heard some kludgy words in beginning paragraphs, but later the story got more interesting as the main character developed depth. I would like to read what happens to him when the book comes out. Though I know, of course, it's bound to be bad, for you don't want to be one of her heroes.

Around 8:30 I poked my head into the panel discussion on authors talking about reviewing books. One author (Malzburg?) was giving a tribute to a reviewer named Burgess, who'd been reviewing SF books since 1965 and who died two years ago. Maltzburg turned to another panelist, Gene Wolfe, and said: "You know, Burgess called you one of our Greatest Living Science Fiction Writers".

Wolfe replied, "Burgess was very insightful."

That was a great response, and got a big laugh. It seemed a little bit too true in this case, at least to me.

I know that authors need to be egotistical. On the other hand, I gave up after the second book of Gene Wolfe's Torturer series, because it was just going on too long and he didn't move the story forward and he was just too pleased with himself and what he could write. The details of his world were just too gruesome to put up with any more without it moving the story forward at a more reasonable pace. After the first book, I thought he was a great writer and had created a compelling character. I got the second book to read more. After the second, I decided he was too egotistical to be a good-enough writer for me to keep reading him. Of course, he's the famous published author on the podium, and I'm not.

FNX vs BOS

As we were leaving Earthfest, an esplanade concert sponsored by WBOS, I met a young intern from rival station WFNX. He was handing out cards for his station.

Aren't you in enemy territory? I asked.

He said yes, but was there to tell people that FNX was better. I like FNX and said so. I also grinned, called him "sonny", and waxed nostalgic about the early '80's, when WFNX was "The New Music Source".

"We still are" he said.

I reminded him that WBOS had just given us a great concert. He agreed, but said that BOS wasn't a real local station like FNX was.

"They have robots. We have live DJ's. They stole our playlist."

Fine, but, driving to work a couple of Fridays ago, I listened to 92.9 playing FNX music, while on FNX the DJ's were having a call-in as to whether Michael Jackson was going to heaven or hell.

My guess would be heaven, but who the hell are they to pose such questions?

mint tulips taffeta

came in my head this morning before I was out of bed. It's been years since I last read The Demolished Man, but those three words stay imprinted in my brain. Little sensory tastes--sweet, then tragic. A woman the detective liked but could not love enough to marry.

How dangerous is caffeine?

Under the influence of three cups of free coffee and too much sugar, I purchased a duck decoy lamp for my nightstand. Perhaps I should stay out of Building 19.

A gray May Day

Would I be wrong to say to a woman leaving the ladies' room with me:

"Hey, come on. There's swine flu. Please wash your hands."

Miss USA 2009

Flicking channels the other night, I came across the Miss USA contest. I called my five-year-old daughter in to watch. Don't they look like Barbie dolls?

Yes, she said, smiling. They look exactly like Barbie. Except they're a different color from my Barbie. And they can move without someone moving their arms and legs for them.

I had switched on just in time for the finalists' questions. Historically, this has always provided a chance for some amusement. The first one fit the stereotype perfectly. She was asked if Health Insurance should be the right of every American. Her response was something to the effect that in politics, it's less important if you're left or right than that you have integrity. Integrity is very important, she said. It was like Tina Fey's impression of Sarah Palin: I'm going to ignore that question and answer this one instead.

Next was Miss California, who waffled when asked about Gay Marriage. Apparently she didn't waffle enough, for her response started a mini-controversy that is still in the news today.

The other two actually gave reasonable answers to their questions. I also decided that they were the two prettiest. I hung around until after the commercial to see them come in last. I thought the contestant who gave the non-answer won, but when I look it up, I see that Miss North Carolina won. The waffler came in second. Miss Arizona, the non-answer-giver, was second-runner-up. I don't remember Miss Carolina's question--perhaps it was before I turned on the show. I've tried Googling for it, but there's only blogging about Miss CA.

It reminded me why I stopped watching beauty contests. They keep not picking the prettiest ones to win.

I was also curious why they bother asking the contestants questions. Is the point of the questions to not pick someone who can give a reasoned response, but to make sure you've selected a spokesperson who will avoid answering any political question no matter how absurd she sounds in her non-response? Without having heard Miss Carolina's Q&A, I can't say.

528xi. Try to date this guy.

He played her Sinatra in the Elantra. He maximized his Maxima, bought the ultimate Altima. But even his impressive Impreza failed to impress her.

--You wanna roll in a Corolla? she scoffed.

-Yes, your ass in a Yuris, he insisted.

--Don't cram me in a Camry. I won't sit in a Fit.

-No dice?

--No vice in your Versa. Your Prizm's a prison.

-Wanna Forerunner for foreplay?

--Don't deny me my Denali. Rip my bodice in an Odyssey.

In her Explorer he tore her fedora. He caught his cape in the door of the Escape. But he focussed her in his Focus, ravaged her in a Rav4, humped her in her Hummer, mounted her in her Mountaineer. The priest arrived in his Prius and they were wed. They happily tumbled into their Tundra.

Through the rear-view of her Vue she could see her ex- in her CRX. The tourists in the Taurus waved good-bye.

The slob in the Saab sobbed, Could I date chicks with a Matrix?

The commute's not getting to me. Really. I'm fine.

He looked at us from his Stratus. Our mother drives an Armada.

so not a dog was fed
so not a word was said
so not a deal was made
so not a debt was paid
so not a thing happened
in the Sonata

murtaugh list

Clever idea on "How I met your mother" Monday night: The Murtaugh List, or list of things we're too old for now.

I thought if I typed it into Google the next day, I'd find mention of it. Didn't get a chance to look until today. Found this.

We'd just been talking about the issue the night before seeing the show.

In your thirties, you find you can't get away with stuff you got away with in your twenties. You're not flexible if you don't stretch regularly. You can hurt yourself if you try things you used to get away with. But you're better in a week or two.

In your forties, the damage lasts for months. Or is permanent.

margie catching up with pop culture

There's a song that I thought was by Joe Jackson that I recently read was by Sublime. I googled Sublime, wondering, Is this a new band?
No. They broke up in 1996, after their lead singer died of a heroin overdose. And they sang other songs I've heard and didn't identify as being by the same people.

arisia 08

best lecture I attended:
Effect of microgravity on human body, or how to get to mars without killing the crew.
Very packed with information. Speaker (Dr. Schneiderman) was very well prepared.

best lecture I only made it to the last 10 minutes of:
Artist Guest of Honor Dave Seeley's description of process, on Sunday.
I wish I could have made it to more.

what I like about Arisia:

variety: panels on art, writing, physiology, burlesque

very nice art exhibit. I'm sorry I didn't buy the hand-painted leaves and space shuttle tie.

great children's program--both fast track and childcare kids were very happy with their weekend.
The lady in charge of childcare/kamikaze costuming kindly let the younger child go up on stage with her elder sister even though the costume was a Building 19 starfleet uniform and a lizard hat--not quite a creatively produced costume.

very accepting atmosphere. Lots of people dressed weirdly walking around and everyone smiling.

unofficial motto of Arisia: We embrace the stereotype.

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.

The forecast said mixed precipitation turning into snow; we've a foot on the ground left from last week. I'm looking out the window, thinking:

Rain, rain, rain.
So long as you're not snow,
I'm not going to complain.

L.A. business idea?

Why is it legal to get paid for having sex in a movie but not if the cameras aren't rolling?
It seems there is a loophole in there.
Why not start a business where a person can pay to star in his own movie, with the porn actor of his choice?
A single copy of the film is made, direct to DVD. The DVD is given to the client, so he can relive the experience in the comfort of his home.
Is that legal? If not, why not?

55 million miles

55 million miles away.
Someday it will matter.
Mars at perigee--
Aunt Sally will be that much closer,
Or some other relative who settled there.
Her voice will be clearer
On the telephone, with less of a delay.
The supply ship will reach her with drugs she needs.
"Balto" will be painted on the side
of some unmanned craft to reach
our colony on the neighboring planet.

gang aft agley

We are all just living in our corner of the galaxy, making plans and saving up and hoping that the Cosmic cleaning crew doesn't notice and wipe us out.

Knowing that some day it will.

Like that mouse in the Burns poem.

9th ant doesn't count

Friday morning, a small ant crawled across my desk. Without much thinking, I reached out to crush it with my finger. It was only wounded. Nature has made ant exoskeletons extra hard. I tried to crush it again, to quickly end its misery, but wasn't sure I succeeded. I considered what to do, then walked down the hall and threw it into the spider web. Seeing it suspended there, I felt guilty. It hadn't blundered into the web. It wasn't its fault. I had interfered with nature. On the other hand, an ant that walks across my desk in the middle of the day doesn't have the survival skills necessary to make it to the next generation.

The dormant spider woke and made a speedy L to the ant. She quickly wrapped it up. I considered that this death was at least more useful than in the wastebasket or down the drain.

Having ruined the scientific validity of my observation of the spider, I wondered if by feeding it I had invoked the stray-cat rule and made it my pet. I decided it was more like a bird feeder in the yard--the birds and squirrels remain wild.

This morning, there were still only eight ant carcasses in the corner. As if the spider knew that we cheated; it hadn't caught that ninth ant on its own. It was just a bonus, so it ate it up and didn't save any.

1 NH Democrat, 3 Weeks before the Primary

I don't see the point of John Edwards this time around. A good speaker with not much experience is done much better by Barak Obama, and without the $400 haircut. Plus Obama is African-American, and has lived in a foreign country. These are good things. I do like how Edwards emphasizes the importance of helping poor people, but good intentions aren't enough.

Lack of experience worries me. Our country has been damaged, and Iraq nearly destroyed, from the blunderings of a pig-headed amateur. I'm hesitant to vote the country to someone who may be well-intentioned, but have a steep learning curve. I'd rather vote on resume and mostly ignore the campaign promises. That's why I'm leaning toward Richardson. He was in Congress, ambassador to the U.N., Secretary of Energy, and now governor. He ought to know how government works. And he's fluent in a second language.

I don't understand why so many of my neighbors have Hillary signs in their front yards. She elicits such visceral hatred from so many non-Democrats. Why do Democrats think she can win? She is, I admit, a great campaigner, but I think there is too much prejudice against her. In the last debate, she said she would like to unite the country. She can hope, but I think she has the least chance of it. In spite of her being the most right wing.

Two people at my synagogue said they want her because they want him back. They loved what Bill Clinton did for the economy, as reflected in their retirement funds. Their wanting her because they liked him raised my feminist distaste at the first female President being a famous wife first. I want someone in because people wanted her.

Revisionist Rudy

I saw an ad on TV last week that made me say "Rudy Giuliani doesn't deserve to be voted dogcatcher, let alone President." He credited Ronald Reagan for getting the hostages released from Iran, something I don't think even the most partisan of Reagan supporters ever claimed. He said Reagan managed this feat during his first hour of his Presidency because "the best way to deal with terrorists, dicatators and tyrants is to stand up to them. You don't back down."

As I recall, the hostage crisis began because President Carter wouldn't back down to pressure from Iran, but allowed the deposed Shah to come to the U.S. for medical treatment. (Giuliani also refers to the captors as "mullahs", when at the time the T.V. news called them "students", but that's minor. I'd grant him the "mullahs" if the rest of the ad made sense.)

My husband, who is from NY, was more sanguine about the revisionist history. "Giuliani is a self-promoting egotist who's catering to the shallowist follower of politics. Reagan sold arms to Iran, that ended up with Hezbollah. Then the money went to the contras. So he supported terrorists."

See:
NYT
http://giuliani2008-blogger.blogspot.com/2007/12/rudy-giuliani-tv-ad-one-hour.html
http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2007/12/guiliani_tv_ad_questioned.html

spider eight

She had an eighth ant in her web today. From early to late morning she brought it to the top of the web. After lunch I noticed the eighth ant deposited in the corner over the tiles, practically on top of another ant.

I've also noticed what looks like the ghost of a spider, where she sometimes hangs out in the corner. Could it be a discarded exoskeleton? Do spiders shed skin like snakes? The shed/dead thing has legs.
I'm pretty sure the spider has been growing. When I first noticed her, she was a much smaller spider. If she's the same one, of course.

This is in an approx. 7'x8' bathroom, which remains dark when no one turns on the light.

spider update: 7!

Tuesday evening I noticed the spider had another ant in her arms, in the middle of her web. I blew at her, to see if she was comatose from ant blood or possibly dead, and she scurried up to the corner of the web nearest to the corner where the ladies' room walls meet. She dragged her ant package up with her, and attended to it at the top of the web, where she'd be less affected by the wind. I wondered if she'd leave this latest ant with the six others. The next morning I noticed that she had. So now there are seven ants wrapped up in the corner of the ladies' room where the single row of vertical tiles meet the wall.

It occured to me that a spider's life is like that of a military patrol. She waits and does apparently nothing for days on end, but is always ready to spring into action for a kill. Then return to dormancy.

My husband's guess is that the ant stash is for baby spiders to come. I'm pretty sure that all we know of the natural history of spiders was learned from Charlotte's Web.

I hope the cleaning people don't get conscientious and clean up her stash, or her. I'd like to know what happens next, and that will possibly take a number of months.

song begging for alternative lyrics

Driving home, listening to WOKQ on the radio the other night, I heard a song whose refrain went:

I don't give a dern what other people think
What do ya think about that?

It's a fun song to sing in the car.

Some googling and I find its name is what do you think about that. Sung by a duo called Montgomery Gentry. And it is #10 on the billboard hot country chart.

The lyrics continue:

I wear what I want to, overalls work boots
Crank my music up loud

Like to sling a little mud in my four wheel drive
Trek it all into town
Shot a little eight ball down at the pool hall
Drink a beer with my friends

Now this is way too masculine for anyone else's opinion to be more than a paper tiger. If you're the toughest guy on the block, your nonconformity is a non-issue. How about singing in that deep low voice something more along the lines of:

I wear my feather boa every day to work
Clicking my high heel shoes.
If I didn't have a different boy every Friday night
A civil union's what I'd choose.

Then you can continue on with the original, but with a more rightfully defiant meaning:

Now don't judge me and I won't judge you
Cause we all get judged in the end....

Some people care about what other people think
Worry about what they say
Let a little gossip
Coming from a loose lip ruin a perfect day
Say, blah, blah, blah, just a jacking their jaws
Gotta letta roll offa my back
What do ya think about that

Say, I don't give a damn what other people think
What do ya think about that
What do ya think about that

spider stash

The spider whose web is in the corner of our office's ladies' room has six ants neatly wrapped up just above where the tiles meet the wall. Are they for winter? For expected spider babies? Or do spiders just do that?

last.fm's AI picks my top artists so far...

Here's a widget generated from the website Last.fm:


I'm not sure how it picks some of these as my top artists. For example, I don't know what Mary Black sounds like, but since it says she sings Irish music, she must have popped up when I asked for "celtic harp" or "Alan Stivell" or "Silly Wizard".

The others were from typing in "lute" or "harpsichord" after typing in "john dowland" or "dowland". I actually did type in "James Blunt" specifically, since his song No Bravery was in my mind. The AI read my mind and played that particular track. Or maybe that was the default track...

It's an interesting site for wanting to hear music that is like something in particular, but still have randomness and surprise. e.g. Jimi Hendrix pops up for harpsichord, since there was a harpsichord on one of his tracks.

NANO!

I'm writing my blog while listening to my new nano. How ought's is that? (We're in the ought's decade, aren't we?)
Have to stop typing. Sting singing Flow my tears just has to be listened to.
First question: No, not the new nano with the TV in it.
Second: And the earbuds aren't bothering me, and they aren't falling out.
oops. spoke too soon. left ear itched; tried to scratch it, now the left one won't go back in.. The apple support website ipod manual really ought to have some directions for the things. ok. it's in. but my left ear is itching again. inside.
Jeff got a free nano when he bought his new apple laptop. He asked me if I wanted an iPod. I said sure. I thought he'd give me his old one now that he had a new one. I'd figured eventually someday I'd get an old shuffle from some niece or nephew who was upgrading. But no. Jeff generously just gave me his brand new in a box shiny blue nano.
And love, is love, in beggars and in kings.
Right. He said I owe him a favor. That made me consider giving it back. Nonspecific favors to be repaid at indefinite dates are something to be cautious about.
But the fact is, we already owe Melinda and Jeff lots of favors. They've
Though all my wares be trash...the heart is true--the heart is true.
been wonderful. For years.
Nano! Nano! Nano! Yay!
Thank you Jeff!

political question

I don't dislike any of the Democratic candidates. John McCain's the only Republican candidate I respect. Should I vote Republican this year, so I can vote for McCain?

Tooth Fairy, Part II, Unclear on the Concept

So I was getting ready for work the first morning after the tooth fairy's first visit to our house when I heard Zoe crying and crying. "What's wrong?" I asked my husband.
He says "I don't know."
I went to Zoe's bed. The tooth case was out, the dollar on the sheets, and Zoe was sobbing.
"Look, the tooth fairy left you a dollar!" I said, or something of the sort. Zoe just kept crying. I cuddled her until she could stop crying enough to speak.
"My teeth are gone!" She said. She didn't want to even look at the dollar.
Unclear on the concept, I think.
"But, that's what the tooth fairy does. You give her the tooth, and she gives you money for it."
"I want my teeth back!" Zoe cried.
"Why? What do you want them for?"
"I want to play with them!"
I truly don't care if the tooth fairy ever visits the house again. I don't feel comfortable lying to Zoe anyway. It seems to me that in childhood we tell our children there's a God, Tooth Fairy, and (sometimes) Santa Claus and Easter Bunny. Then when they grow up we tell them we were lying about all but the first of those. I wish we could be honest, but there's too much social pressure not to be.
And I don't care if she has the teeth or not. Ugly small bloody things. I'm glad we didn't throw them out. She can have them. But how to maintain the lie?
"Maybe if you write the tooth fairy a note, she'll give them back to you...."
We make up stories about maybe today when Zoe's in school, Daddy can find the teeth in the woods where the fairy hid them. By evening we decide to put some shiny sequins in the tooth box to buy back the teeth. (Zoe rejects the notion of giving back the dollar.) But when bedtime comes, the tooth case is lost. Now it's Monday night, and I haven't heard anything else about the teeth.

Tooth Fairy, Part I

Zoe had her first loose tooth while she was still in kindergarten, last May. It didn't fall out, but the one next to it also became loose over the summer. Months went by. The two grownup teeth started to grow in behind the loose baby teeth, but they still didn't fall out. After two months, Zoe gave up asking me when they would fall out. I was as mystified as she. I don't remember enough about being in the baby-teeth-falling-out age to know if this is normal or not. Finally, last Thursday, during second day of first grade, she "pulled" them out. I'm not sure if she always could have done so, but, I came home from work and learned that Ro and I needed to play tooth-fairy that night.
"If you told me before I left work, I could have stopped at the bank and seen if they had any dollar coins," I said.
The tooth fairy job was complicated by Zoe not using the traditional envelope. After yanking out her teeth, Zoe was sent to the school nurse, who presented her with a white plastic tooth-shaped tooth case on a gold cord. The tooth-case looked too small to hold anything but maybe a dime.
Ro wondered how we'd get the case out from under Zoe's pillow. I snuck it out easily. Children do sleep soundly. If they didn't, I don't think this tooth fairy custom would be so widespread or have survived so long.
We wonder what to do with the teeth. "I think my parents threw them out," I say. I remember that's what we concluded when we reached the age to know the Truth about the Tooth Fairy.
"It seems like something we should save," said Rodrigo. "I should call my mother and ask her what to do with them."
"She'll say throw them out!"
I take the teeth that Ro has put an envelope. Where to hide it? Zoe goes through all of my stuff. I put it in Ro's drawer, too high and stuck for Zoe to open.
Since it was two teeth, we thought we should put two dollars in the case.
We considered ironing the dollar bills so they'd look nice, but I figured I'd have to fold them up very tiny anyway. The tooth case was too small for two dollars. I only managed to fit in one dollar bill, much creased and folded, and then rolled up to fit inside the case.
I snuck it back under the pillow.
How I wished I could see her expression the next day when she opened the case and found the dollar!

Why I like the radio

Walking in the parking lot of our industrial complex at lunch, I hear a U2 song that I like blaring out. It reminds me of why I like the radio. When the radio plays a good song, it's random good luck. And often it's a song I haven't thought of for a while. With an iPod/CD/Cassette, I have to decide and choose. There's nothing unexpected random spontaneous good luck about it. Of course, after switching stations many times with no satisfaction, it's sometimes a relief to push in the CD or cassette and hear that favorite song.

twenty per cent

On August 13th I received an email saying my submitted screenplay was in the top 20% of those entered into the Nichol's competition. This means that about a thousand scripts were better than mine, but about four thousand were worse.
It actually felt very good to get this email. Prior to that, I'd only learned that my script didn't make it into the top-5%-quarterfinals. I started to wonder if the script had been rejected right away as being too weird or whatever. I remember saying to Rodrigo, "It sounds funny, but I feel bad for my characters. I cared about them so much. I wanted them to be understood."
I'd obsessed over the screenplay from last fall until the week before the deadline, when I mailed it. I took a screenwriting class in the 1980's, and wrote a script I was embarressed to read again last year. Since then, I hadn't written anything in that format. Somehow, at the end of last summer, dialogues started to occuring to me, as if dictated by God. I typed them in, tried to put them into story format, and realized it had to be a screenplay. I looked up "screenplay" on Wikipedia and learned about the Nichol's competition.
By the week before the deadline, I knew I didn't have the best screenplay in the world. "It isn't going to win, should I still send it in?" I asked Rodrigo.
"You've been working towards this deadline. You may as well, " he replied.
Twenty per cent may not seem like a great writing credit. But it gives my writing some validation. I'm not a total flake raving about something that's completely incomprehensible to rational beings. Was that worth the $40 entry fee?
That, along with the sense that I tried, and took myself seriously, makes it worth it to me. Those who know how very cheap I am (and how short our funds last summer) may be surprised to hear it.

ear buds

I finally flew on an airplane last weekend, for the first time since the nineties. The airline was called Airtrans, which I don't think I even heard of before a month ago. They gave out pretzels, which I'd been told not to expect, nowadays; and they also gave out ear-buds.

I found a station in the on-board XM Satellite radio playing beautiful opera, and tried to put the ear-buds in my ear. They fell out. I pushed them in deeper. The one in the left ear stayed, but hurt my ear. I took it out and tried again. I tried listening with the earbuds held close to my ear but not so much in that they hurt, but there was too much of a swooshing sound interfering with the music.

I felt like a technological neophyte. I wondered if there was a trick to them that I just hadn't learned.

The lady next to me had brought her own white i-Pod ear buds, so I thought maybe the expensive ones are more comfortable. I looked around the airplane, trying to see other people with airplane-issued black ear-buds. Across the aisle there was a teenager, and in front of him a 50 or 60ish year old gentleman. They both had black ear-buds, and they both seemed content. I checked the orientation of the bud wires with respect to their ears--yes, I seem to have got that right. I couldn't notice anything they were doing that made the buds work for them.

A day later I complained to my sister Frannie about the ear-buds. Frannie has been flying a lot lately, and should know about them. "I think our ears are shaped differently," she said. "I can't get them to fit comfortably either."

All this time I've been envying those silhouttes dancing with abandon in the iPod Shuffle commercials. Now it turns out that I don't want to be among them. Cheap ear phones, like the kind I got on a Virgin Atlantic flight years ago, always worked fine. But now they're probably harder to obtain.

Why I don't want to vote for Hillary

Reasons, rational and not, why I truly hope some other Democrat will get the nomination:

• Hatred of the cynical nepotism that motivates Party movers and shakers to back someone with name recognition over other, more qualified, candidates. This is what brought us the current President Bush. It also got Hillary her Senate seat in the first place. Perhaps one can't argue with elective success, but, given the current state of the world wrought by a dangerously incompentent President, how can one not oppose it?
  
• She says she voted to give President Bush authority to start the Iraq war because she trusted him. Presidents should be a better judge of character than that. They need to appoint lots of people to run things. When they screw up, will her excuse be that she trusted them? We've had enough of that from the current President. ('Brownie, you're doing a hell of a job.')
  
• If we had national health insurance, I'd feel a lot better about her. She should have anticipated the insurance companies' reaction to her plan. As Birch Bayh said, "It takes a good politician to make a good president."
• Feminist Idealism. I'd like the first woman President to be one who came to prominence through her own achievements, not that of her husband. Dianne Feinstein , Susan Collins, Nancy Pelosi, Christine Todd Whitman. Someone like that. Had Margaret Chase Smith run for president back in the 1960's, one could argue that she had originally won her seat because of her husband, but by then she had made quite a name for herself on her own. I don't think Hillary Clinton has the long expericence that justifies a run for the Presidency.
• If Hillary wins the nomination, we'll have to listen to that awful Celine Dion song until election day.
  

Sopranos ending

From the spoilers reported on NPR, it was a satisfying ending, at least for me. I've only seen a few minutes of the series. HBO was never in our budget. I noticed that the first season is on DVD at the Goffstown library, but we haven't decided whether to get it out. Even if we do, we'll still be six years behind everybody else. Rod says it's probably too violent for me, but he could be overprotective. We saw the first season of Rome on DVD, and liked it.

I haven't given up on watching the Sopranos some day. (It could show up edited on broadcast TV, as Sex and the City did.) So I like that there wasn't a definitive ending, because when I finally do get around to viewing it, the episodes won't be colored by my thinking "This is a show about a man who eventually..."

The spoiler I'm worried about is the day after the last Harry Potter book comes out. It's a wait to get those books out of the library. That hasn't mattered in the past.

Paris Hilton

I'm such a geek that I have to translate her into Cynthia Duchess from Stranger in a Strange Land in order to understand why we have to hear about her.

I prefer to get my entertainment from fiction. The main purpose of journalism in a democracy ought to be helping us decide how to vote.

3-can 'chili' recipe

Combine and heat in a saucepan:

• 1 can "mexican stewed tomatoes" (we use Stop & Shop brand)
• 1 can beans (e.g. black beans)
• 1 small can tomato paste
  
• frozen corn
• frozen spinach

Serve with rice, cornbread, grated cheese, whatever.

You can stir instant rice into the mixture, if you're really desperate for a quick one-pot meal.

Lloyd Alexander 1924-2007

http://sfwa.org/news/2007/lalexander.htm

Well, now I'm in mourning. I read his books over and over in childhood. Kind of in the transition from Oz to Heinlein, with lots of overlap. (Just finished a new novel by him last week, in fact.)
He's the only author I ever sent a fan letter to. He sent a very nice letter back, with a hello from his wife, Janine. Kind of romantic they died so close together. Still, sad.

Two novels by John Scalzi

(Spoilers Warning!)

It took me a long time to get through Old Man's War. Part of it was that I was writing a screenplay for the Nicholl's deadline of May 1st. But it was also that the story spent a lot of time in set-up. It moved in fits and starts until it was more than half over. I know I would have wolfed through a Harry Potter novel in a weekend, no matter what.

By the end of the book, Scalzi had introduced two interesting groups of characters. One was of the Consu, a highly-advanced race that has a religious need to war against the lower races, including our own, in order to raise them up spiritually. Without this religious need, they could just use their superior technology to annihilate everyone else. The other interesting characters were those in the "Ghost Brigades". These were soldiers created from the genetic make-up of army volunteers who died before they got to serve. Chronologically, they are children, but they function as adults--being able to communicate in English and fight battles within a few weeks of their coming into being.

When I saw that the next novel in the series was called The Ghost Brigades, I wanted to read it. I figured, the first novel was slow, but Scalzi has already set up the universe of his story--now we can get to the fun part. The novel did read a lot faster than the previous one. In that, it did not disappoint. The main character was likeable; it was fun to be in his head. The premise reminded me a bit of the cover blurb for Valerie Freireich's Becoming Human: "Can the clone of a traitor overcome his legacy, or will he be doomed to repeat it?" In Freirich's novel, you learn from the beginning that the traitor in question wasn't really a traitor, so the problem for the clone is growing up under the cloud of unjustified suspicion. In Scalzi's novel, a ghost brigade soldier is built to contain a recording of the consciousness of an escaped traitor, in hopes that the new soldier will remember enough of the mind of the traitor to provide clues as to the traitor's motivation and whereabouts.

The new soldier, Jared Dirac, isn't told about his progenitor's past, so doesn't have the cloud of shame with which Freireich's character had to contend. When he awakens with no memory of the traitor, he is raised as any ghost brigade soldier, and that's a delightfully interesting combination of childhood and basic training--over in two weeks. Then he's fighting wars, seeing things with a possibly more mature understanding than his peers. It's fun for the reader to note his perceptions and wait for more and more of the traitor's personality to surface. When the memories finally do return, then the hunt is on.

My problem with both books is in their endings. In the first novel, the main character, John Perry, finds a ghost brigade soldier who is created from the DNA of his dead wife. Perry has spent most of the novel mourning his wife, so it isn't surprising that he wants to meet her double, who is named Jane Sagan. The problem is that Jane is essentially a child, who has very little to do with Perry's deceased wife, or much besides soldiering in common with Perry himself. Scalzi should have left it as a bitter lesson: that you can't bring back the dead, you have to forge new relationships with the living. Instead, by the end of the novel, Jane agrees to go live with Perry on a colony farm, assuming they both survive their enlistments. The reader is left wondering, live together as what? Does he see the clone of his wife as a sort of daughter? Are they supposed to be lovers? He'll be eighty-five; she'll be ten. Does he expect the personality of his dead wife to surface? Well, at least there's the comfort that the odds of them both surviving are very small.

Ironically, I have the opposite problem with the next book--the characters' failure to bring back the dead when given the chance to do so. The traitor has an innocent daughter, named Zoe. Jared remembers the traitor's love for his little girl, and feels it as well. At the end of the novel, both Jared and the traitor are dead, but the little girl is saved. Jane orders her last surviving soldier during a battle to find and save a recording that had been made of Jared's consciousness. Then she later decides to destroy the recording, and thus the chance of bringing to life another clone who could serve as Zoe's father. This is judged to be a good moral choice--proof, even, that she "has a soul". The judge of this soul-quality is an alien from a race that has no qualms about butchering humans (including children) to cook and eat. But this judgement isn't presented as ironic.

Jane Sagan is told that both she and John Perry can get early retirement from the service, and go live on a farm, while raising Zoe as their daughter. She chooses to do so, and I think that is supposed to be a happy ending. But I am left wondering: Could there possibly be two people less suitable to raise a child? One of them, Jane Sagan, was never a child herself. That she even knew how to calm a frightened child strained my credulity. The other, John Perry, is a grandfather, who finished raising his children years ago, and wasn't sufficiently interested in his own grandchildren to stay on Earth to watch them grow up. Not to mention my doubts as to the stability of the home. Could Jane actually be happy on a farm and inside a slow, clumsy body, with its reduced abilities of perception, after spending the entire nine years of her existence as a super-enhanced human? Won't she start to miss the other "ghosts"--people like her? And does she really accept being out of the loop? She's survived nine years. She should be advancing into the upper echelon, toward becoming a decision maker in the power structure. Not shunted aside.

Yet this is considered a more moral solution than to bring back alive a clone who will have the memories of being a father to the child, and actual feelings of love for her. After some initial problems adjusting, Jared did seem to integrate his progenitor's memories with his new unique personality fairly well. Had Scalzi described more suffering in the process, the decision not to revive Jared would have made more sense.

In The Ghost Brigades, the soldiers are shown innocently enjoying a sexual orgy that is apparently the tradition following each battle. So now we know that they do have sex. They say that their commander, Lieutenant Jane Sagan, doesn't participate in the orgies any more, but that's OK, since they're optional. The reader is supposed to assume that Jane doesn't any more, because she's saving herself for John Perry, the geezer to whom she is quasi-engaged. That doesn't seem fair. Scalzi is called a successor to Robert Heinlein, but Heinlein wouldn't have done that to a female character. He would have had Jane enjoying the orgies right up until she's able to meet back up with her true love. For evidence of that, see Glory Road, about kicking the stranger's shoes away from his lover's bed when he's ready to come back to her ("but I would go see Star first, or soon anyhow, and kick that strange pile of shoes aside"), or Lazarus Long's mother's guilt-free willingness to have an affair while his dad was at war.

I get the impression that Scalzi is trying to give people what he thinks they want. He really failed in my case. Scalzi is not Heinlein. Heinlein's characters behaved in a way that made sense within their context.

Army Ranger Captain Jonathan Grassbaugh, killed by a roadside bomb

Here are different links to articles about a young man from New Hampshire, recently killed in Iraq:

• teaching at 10. His fourth-grade teacher spontaneously asked Jon to teach the rest of class long-division. He remembered the boy as being both a "math whiz" and a natural teacher.
  
• drummer boy at 14. The "28th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry", a Civil War Reenactment group, remembers him fondly. there's a cute photo of 14-year-old Jonathan dressed as a Civil War drummer.
• rings of jupiter - "His brother remembered a night Jonathan invited the family to the Grainger Observatory at Phillips Exeter Academy, to see a full moon and the rings around Jupiter."
• bicycle helmet & pizza stories, by Joelle Farrell of the Concord Monitor, reprinted in iraqnam.blogspot.com
  
• NHPR story on how he met his wife helping her move into dorm, post office, pledging in military fraternity, wedding video

I've been listening to NPR since the war began. They have profiled many soldiers who have died. This one has upset me the most.