The Den of Ubiquity

2004-06-11T00:06:00.000-06:00

When Will You Make Up Your Mind

I'm not much for exercising. Maybe that stems from being two years younger than most kids and thus developing a distaste for Phys. Ed. class. Or maybe not. There's pretty much only two forms of exercise that I don't really mind undertaking--swimming and cycling.

I used to ride my bike a lot, in Grande Prairie. I was a late starter, or maybe not late when you consider my age and not my grade. I was probably eight or nine by the time I could ride without training wheels, which was Grade 5 or 6 for me. But after that, I took to it quite readily. It was nice, several months of the year(I refused to ride in snow and ice)to have that mobility. I could ride to and from school most days, go visit my friend Jeremy, etc. I started out with an ugly purple bike, but that didn't bother me, and I tended to boast that at least nobody would want to steal it.

When I was in high school, we moved to the other side of town, and I kept up with the bike riding. After a few months I discovered the paved trails along Bear Creek, which went all the way down to the G.P. Regional College, not too far from the high school. They were a little hilly, but by that point I had acquired an eighteen-speed mountain bike. I was never any good at shifting gears, though, so I stayed in the same gear most of time--the highest one. And I still got to the point where I could climb some pretty serious hills without always having to get off and push before reaching the top.

Then, after one year of college, I moved to Edmonton for university. My bike didn't fit in the first load I brought down, and it took an entire year for it to get sent down on the bus. I rode it around Millwoods a few times, and I was a little bit out of shape, but not too bad. I kept it locked up with a plastic-sheathed metal cable and a plain combination lock. And it got stolen within weeks. I went out one morning and they'd obviously hacksawed right through the cable. I felt like an idiot. We were renting the top floor of a house, and there was a big gap in the back fence so the downstairs people could park there. My bike had been locked up in plain view of a fairly major street.

And that's been pretty much it. At some point we inherited some ten-speeds, but they had tire leak problems, and we never got around to getting the things fixed. When Sharna was storing her bike with us a couple of years ago, I took it out a few times, and by this time I was so pitiful I could barely ride for ten minutes without coming back wheezing, panting and drenched in sweat.

What I really want, at this point, is an exercise bike. I can do all the wheezing and panting in the privacy of home, without sun and wind and bugs. And whenever I decide to stop, I'm already home.

In the meantime, there's swimming. I took a lot of swimming lessons, though they kept changing the grades so I was never sure where I was. I do recall taking some survival/rescue-oriented stuff at least once, so I'm probably not too bad.

When Nicole and I lived downtown, there was a community centre nearby with an outdoor pool that we visited often in the summer. We got out of the habit when we moved to Grande Prairie, and only really started going back(apart from a few visits to the West Edmonton Mall wave pool)with the kids. They have good kids' facilities at the Millwoods Rec Centre, and even a wave pool.

For the past few years, though, it seems that every time I go to the pool I catch something. At least one ear infection, and possibly more, and most recently a case of athlete's foot, which finally cleared up(hopefully)a week or two ago.

I'd have to say that athlete's foot is less unpleasant than the ear infections. Those things got quite painful, especially when I had both inner and outer ear infections, or both ears at once. Earplugs in the bathtub, eardrops several times a day...not fun. Rubbing some antifungal cream between my toes once a day, more manageable.

But it makes me leery of the pool, now. I've heard that the kid's pool, where we spend a lot of time with Luke and Simon, is the worst culprit, or possibly the hot tub. If I stayed clear of those, I'd probably be okay. But I'll be stuck with the kids' pool for a few years yet. Sigh. Maybe I just need to go by myself for lane swims or something. But that cuts into my personal time that I'd rather spend doing other stuff.

So for now I guess I'll continue being "obese". Taking walks is kind of boring, takes too much time, and hurts my feet. Team sports are just a pain, plus they have to involve other people. Running is like walking, except you exchange time for pain. Public gyms cost money. I climb the stairs at work instead of taking the elevator, which gives me a good five-six minutes of exercise a day.

What I'm really waiting for is technology for rendering exercise and dieting obsolete. Nanobots that keep body fat at reasonable levels, or some way of keeping your metabolism high enough that you're always burning it off. Of course, I'll be dead by the time they come out with any of that stuff. But I can still hope, and it's easier than doing something about it myself.

We don't know our neighbours that well. A couple of years ago we noticed that the fence on one side of our backyard was getting very saggy. Eventually we decided to get it fixed, but we concluded, perhaps cravenly, that trying to get them to pay for half of it wouldn't be worth the trouble. So we told them were going to fix it, and then we got it fixed. (By someone else--we're not handy.)

Now the same thing is happening on the other side. Those neighbours are apparently concerned because the fence is sagging, and they're getting it fixed. But there's more to it than that, because it's sagging due to the junk in our yard pushing on it.

It's not our junk. Well, I suppose it is now, but we didn't put it there. It was there when we got the house, and we never had much of a reason to look at it until now. And now we have to clear it out. We don't really have anywhere else to put it, so we have to call somebody to come and haul it away for us.

We spent some time on Wednesday at least clearing away the stuff against the fence. A lot of fenceposts, probably from where some of our predecessors took out the fence at the end of the driveway so they could extend it and cover it with a carport. Some hollow metal tubes that may have something to do with gardening, I don't know. Some broken chunks of concrete, some rocks, some of that foot-high metal garden fencing. A few other bits of trash--plastic bags, a beer bottle. A big green beetle, and probably other arthropod denizens that I would rather not tally.

There was one cool thing, though, that I may keep. It's a stick, like your average fallen branch, stripped of twigs and bark, but wrapped in canvas. I always loved picking up those branches and stripping them if I happened to be walking in the woods. I did it a lot walking through Bear Creek Park in Grande Prairie years ago, and I did it on the long weekend when we were walking through the woods on my mom and stepdad's farm. But wrapping it in canvas--that's cool.

It's been a slow month or so for books. I read Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising. It says "A Jack Ryan novel" on the cover, and it seemed to have been Clancy's next book after The Hunt For Red October. The first Clancy novel I tried, actually, was The Sum of All Fears, but it didn't take long before I discovered it was later in the series.

However, though I do believe that some of the names in the book are familiar with the other two Clancy books I've read, Jack Ryan was not one of them. Repeat, there is no appearance by Jack Ryan in Red Storm Rising. This is not necessarily a bad thing...but it's a misleading notation. It's like when Escape Velocity was marketed as being in the same series as The Warlock In Spite of Himself, when in fact it's mostly just that the two sets of characters intersect in The Warlock Wandering, as far as I can tell. It's a marketing thing, I'm sure.

In any event, it was not that bad a book. Long, but one expects that from Clancy. I learned a lot about modern warfare, particularly the submarine kind. It included several plotlines, in various areas of the war, but my favourite would definitely have to be Edwards, the Air Force meteorologist who ends up the highest ranking officer on Iceland after the Russians sack an American airfield there, and has to tramp around the island with a few marines and a girl they rescued from Russian molesters. You could've done a book about him right there, although then he might have had to do more than stay out of sight, watch, and radio in once in a while.

I just finished The Caves of Buda by Leah R. Cutter. It's one of my random library paperback rack picks, where I grab a book by an author I've never read before, that's not in the middle of a series. Sometimes they're hard to come by. This one drew me in with Hungarian elements, because I like Hungarian stuff. Mostly because of Hungarian's nature as one of the few non-Indo-European languages in Europe. It's also got some cool stuff with an obsessive-compulsive guy who turns out to be performing actual magic with his compulsive rituals. It doesn't all work, but it's decent enough.

The Caves of Buda took me a week to finish, though, because I was also reading The Watcher's Guide, a "Buffy" companion book. It only covers the first two seasons, but that's mostly okay because we're still working on the fourth one. Still had some interesting stuff, especially some of the interviews. But it meant that I was only getting about thirty pages of Buda read a day, which is slow for me. That's about a half-hour's reading, and I can usually muster a little more than that.

Going back to some books from earlier this year--holy Mowgli, am I still only up to January??? Well, let me soldier on through, because this way I can put off working on my NaNoWriYe novel:

Dave Duncan: Impossible Odds. I'm not quite as enamoured of Duncan's King's Blades books as I am of some of his others, but he still manages to put together a rip-roaring tale of swashbuckling adventure in his thinly-disguised fantasy Europe. This one is in something like fantasy Austria, or something Germanic, at least, with lots of magical twists. A worthy addition to the series, if not my favourite.

Gordon R. Dickson: Soldier, Ask Not. You know, for the most part I've been pretty take-it-or-leave-it with Gordon R. Dickson, though I'd never really read much of his Dorsai series. Well, this one might have sold me on it. While dated in some respects(the female characters, for instance), I found it a spellbinding tale of a man with great power learning to use it for good instead of evil. Sounds hokey when put like that, but that's what it boils down to.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Diplomatic Immunity. I held myself back from reading this one after devouring the last few Bujold books. Mirror Dance, Memory, Komarr, and A Civil Campaign were all amazingly great books. This one is pretty good, but not her best. Perhaps the fact that Miles seems to finally be happy in his personal life has taken some of the edge off, and there's little to no Mark in it either. It didn't quite gel the way the others did, which makes it still a good book, just not a superlatively great one.

Terry Pratchett: Night Watch. Pratchett still continues, as the Discworld series goes ever on, to get better with each book. He did have a misstep or two there, with The Fifth Elephant in particular, but the last few are some of the best of the entire series. I waited for this one to come out in paperback, for some reason(and I'm still waiting for Monstrous Regiment, or even The Wee Free Men), but it was worth it. Sam Vimes is once again the main character, as he is so often of late, but Pratchett shows us yet more facets of his character as he goes back in time to mentor his younger self. Reminiscent of Les Misérables in places, and probably A Tale of Two Cities and other French revolutionary works.

Gordon Korman: Island(Shipwreck/Survival/Escape). This is really one novel released in three tiny volumes, so I read them all at once. Korman moves fairly firmly into YA thriller territory here. He's still got a wacky character or two, but he's not playing everything for jokes. Instead, his young characters have to deal with, well, surviving a shipwreck and escaping, with a few sinister subplots. He rises to the occasion and creates a spellbinding tale. He's got a few other of these "trilogies" out now, and I wish they'd stop releasing them like that--it's silly.

Michelle West: Sea of Sorrows. Michelle West pulls off a good moment here and there, but somehow her books seem to drag. In this, the fourth book of her "Sun Sword" series, every single scene seems to be imbued with ponderous significance. A single fight scene contains three chapters' worth of flashbacks. And because of the way the previous book ended, we have to spend the first half of the book catching up with one entire set of characters until we can reach the point when the last book ended. When you do get back to the other characters, things are picking up mightily, and things are starting to come together. Still, it's hard to believe that she's only got two more books to try to wrap up the series. Hopefully she won't introduce too many new plot threads in there.

Gordon R. Dickson: Three To Dorsai!. I was really looking for Tactics of Mistake, but what I found was this book, a three-volume omnibus also containing Necromancer and Dorsai!, which I was pretty sure I'd read before. However, since I couldn't remember very much from those two books, I decided to reread them anyway. I'm glad I did, because now, with Soldier, Ask Not under my belt, I felt like I had a much better handle on the structure of the Childe Cycle universe, and I could tie the names of planets and characters into what I read in other books. Now I'm wondering, did Dickson ever finish his Childe Cycle? I remember huge volumes like The Final Encyclopedia and Young Bleys coming out, but I know that there were supposed to be historical novels in there too. Of course, the whole Childe thing seemed to be predicated on a misunderstanding of the nature of evolution, as if it were some search for the perfectibility of organisms instead of something much more haphazard and contingent. If I believed in an afterlife, I'd hope that Stephen Jay Gould was setting him straight.

Mercedes Lackey: Magic's Promise. I've been moving slowly through the Last Herald-Mage series. Vanyel seems just a bit too tragic a figure for me, sometimes, and I know that his ultimate fate is not going to be good. It's engaging in parts, but in other parts is trying to be too cute or something. I imagine I'll finish the series sometime.

Philip K. Dick: Eye In The Sky. This was a reread of what I think is the first Dick book I ever read(unless it was The Unteleported Man). It's still one of my favourites, and it holds up well, as a group of characters thrown together by an accident at a nuclear facility find themselves moving through a strange sequence of worlds of their own creation.

Glen Cook: Star's End. The end of his "Starfishers" trilogy, which is not one of Cook's greatest works, but satisfying enough. Cook's science fiction rarely seems to be as good as his fantasy, for some reason. The books in this series didn't seem to hang together that well, either. Well, I'm getting closer to being caught up on his earlier works...

Catherine Asaro: Skyfall. Nicole has been raving about Asaro's Skolian Empire series, so I thought I'd try this one when she had it out from the library. It's in the nature of a prequel, featuring the parents of the main characters from later books, so I tried it first. It was interesting, but it did seem to suffer from prequelitis, where the author knew the way things had to turn out to be consistent with later books, but somehow it didn't always feel natural. But it got me interested in the series anyway.

Piers Anthony & Robert Kornwise: Through The Ice. I used to buy Piers Anthony all the time, until the double dreck of The Colour of Her Panties and Firefly turned me off him. Somehow I've ended up with a few of his collaborations on my shelves, and I'd heard good things about this once when it came out. It still reads like a typical Piers Anthony work, but at least not an especially bad one.

Robert Silverberg: The Stochastic Man. One of Silverberg's many novels from the 1970's, I think nominated for a Nebula Award or something. It's an interesting tale of precognition and freewill, as well as politics. Is a man who sees his own future is reduced to nothing more than someone reading lines from a script? Read and find out!

Catherine Asaro: Primary Inversion. And then I leapt right into the actual first book published in the Skolian Empire saga. It has a very different mood from Skyfall, with the main character being a high-tech fighter-pilot type, but it's not a military novel by any means. She gets post-traumatic stress disorder, and she gets into serious difficulties when she finds herself falling in love with the enemy empire's heir apparent... Leaves a lot of loose ends at the finish, so I'm not surprised that there's another half-dozen or so books in the saga, with more to come.

Jack L. Chalker: Balshazzar's Serpent. Chalker has almost reached the Anthony point. Not a sudden, swift decline, but a slow one where I keep hoping that he'll find his feet again. But he hasn't written much decent since the Wonderland Gambit series. This book feels like it could have been a shorter part of another book, with gratuitous complications added to pad out the part of the plot that is actually relevant to the rest of the series. Of course, I could be wrong, there could be more stuff that will be relevant later, but I highly doubt it. Come on, Jack, you're using up your accumulated goodwill here.

George MacDonald: Phantastes. An odd book, very nineteenth century in tone, about a man who finds himself wandering in Fairyland. Key word here is "wandering". So there's not much in the way of plot, though partway through the book we do get a shadow-self somewhat after the style of A Wizard of Earthsea, which spiced things up a bit. But otherwise a fairly languid book.

Simon R. Green: Winner Takes All. Holy Mowgli, how long ago was it that I read the first book, Hawk And Fisher? Loooong time ago. It was a decent, if thin, book about cops in a medieval fantasy city. Bears some resemblances, I notice now, to Glen Cook's Garrett series, and also occasionally to "Grimjack". It has an anachronistic feel to it, without any overt references to really jar the reader. This one is based around city politics, for instance, which don't seem really medieval but don't seem modern either. Maybe a bit of Thieves' World in here too, come to think of it. But Green makes it work fairly well.

Guy Gavriel Kay: The Last Light of The Sun. Set in the same fantasy historical setting(not to be confused with Dave Duncan's fantasy Europe)as The Lions of Al-Rassan and The Sarantine Mosaic, this novel moves up to Saxon-era England. We've got marauding "Vikings", cattle-stealing "Welshman", and a king who's trying to hold it all together. And there are the same occasional traces of fantasy, this time mostly in the form of Faerie. It's not quite as majestic as some of his work, and it's not the revelation that Tigana was, but it holds together fairly well. One conceit that Kay repeats over and over again is to take a minor character you will never see again, and paint in the broad strokes of what happens to them for the rest of their life. It's occasionally a bit annoying, but it must fit in with his theme or something.

China Miéville: Perdido Street Station. I'd tried this one before, from the library, and never made it through. But after reading The Scar and liking that one, I bought this one in paperback and gave it another try. I don't think I like it as much as The Scar, but it still has its moments. Sometimes it feels like the author's thrown in a few too many things, almost first-novelitis(though I gather that King Rat was his actual first), but in the main it hangs together.

Legends. I'd read a few bits from the anthology already--the novella version of "New Spring", Tad Williams's "The Burning Man", Ursula Le Guin's "Dragonfly", and the Terry Pratchett story. This time I went through and read the whole thing. I don't feel like I'd really missed that much, though. The Terry Pratchett one, featuring Granny Weatherwax, I reread this time as well, and still enjoyed. The Terry Goodkind one, "Debt of Bones", did not inspire me to any greater haste in starting that series. Raymond Feist's "The Wood Boy" did not inspire me to read much more of his Riftwar books. The Robert Silverberg Majipoor story was okay, but not a revelation. No, what I was reading that book for was George R.R. Martin's "The Hedge Knight", and that was a really good story, a fine, if peripheral, addition to "A Song of Ice And Fire". Also surprisingly good was the Stephen King Gunslinger story, "The Little Sisters of Eluria". Let's see, am I forgetting anything? Well, the Anne McCaffrey one, "Runner of Pern", was slight and inessential, but not painful to read. The Orson Scott Card one, "The Grinning Man", was also interesting but not revelatory.

And I think, if I may go into another paragraph here, that that's the problem with the anthology. The authors are trying to produce a story which introduces their world to people who haven't yet encountered it, and in most cases are trying not to put anything into the story that will be crucial to the series, for people who don't read the story. Terry Goodkind's had an ending which contrived in a very prequelly fashion to explain something which was probably already a fact of life by the beginning of the series. Robert Jordan's was also very prequelly, but as someone who is devouring everything he can find on the series, I don't mind that. But "The Hedge Knight" was practically the only one that stood on its own two feet.

Dick Francis: Comeback. Continuing to work my way through my Dick Francis backlog, though since he seems to have gone on indefinite hiatus there's not as much hurry. This book is a great read anyway, with a diplomat's son coming back to his hometown to help out some chance-met friends whose veterinary business(there's the horse-racing angle, of course)is under threat from an unknown saboteur. Has loads of Francis's spot-on characterization details, and the bit of romance he often manages to work in. A worthy sample of his opus.

Stephen King: The Drawing of The Three. At least partly inspired by the story from Legends, I finally(after some years of neglecting it)went on to the second Gunslinger book. The first one didn't really grab me that much, but this one hooked me pretty early in. I loved the first section of the book, though I can't say I was quite so enamoured with the rest of it. The interaction with our world caught me off-guard, but it was a great way to spice up the book a little bit, considering how desolate Roland's travels tend to be otherwise. I'm not sure if that makes me look forward to trying The Waste Lands or not.*

Robert W. Chambers: The King In Yellow. Now this one was a little bit deceptively marketed. Touted as psychological horror by one of the masters, it only partially fills the bill. It's a collection of stories, ostensibly all linked by the titular work of fiction. (I first encountered references to it, by the way, in James Blish's story "Let There Be More Light".) The first few stories are interesting enough, avoiding the Lovecraftian mold while still following similar outlines. But as the book goes on, the psychological horror elements recede further and further, until all we have is tepid stories of young artists in Paris falling in love with woman of questionable morals. And very little is revealed about the actual King In Yellow, or "King In Yellow"--you'll get more of that from the Blish story.

Anne McCaffrey: The Coelura. "Runner of Pern" did not inspire me to read this book--its thinness did. And that was even before I realized that this was an illustrated book, with drawings on about every third page. It's a glorified novelette, really, printed in a large font and padded with pictures. And, to be honest, it reminded me in a few ways of Asaro's Skyfall. But it was a decent enough little tale--I just hope I didn't pay full price for it.

William Goldman: Boys And Girls Together. I think that this is the same guy who wrote The Princess Bride and Marathon Man, but you could hardly tell it from this book. Predating the others by ten years or more, this reads like some attempt to write a Great American Novel or something. It has its moments, but it sprawls, following a number of different characters whose lives seem to take too long to converge. And the plots are nothing special, either--I got heartily sick of the girl who falls in love with the married man. Maybe that was a groundbreaking thing to write about back in 1964, but these days it's banal. There's homosexuality in it too, and perhaps I couldn't judge, but Goldman seemed to deal with it a little ham-handedly. I'm so glad he got better than this, and I'm almost sorry I read it.

Dave Duncan: A Man of His Word. That last book left such a bad taste in my mouth that I decided to go and reread something that I knew I liked, Dave Duncan's Magic Casement. This was the first book of his "Man of His Word" tetralogy, and when I finished it I went straight on to the rest of them--Faery Lands Forlorn, Perilous Seas, and Emperor And Clown. I'd have to say that, on rereading, the first and last books seemed to be the best. In fact, very little seems to happen in FLF, but perhaps that's because very little of the information that the characters were discovering was news to me, having read it before. But the finale of the series is very fine indeed, and worth getting to. There's also a sequel tetralogy, which I didn't like quite as much, but by this point I may end up rereading it sometime as well.

Frederik Pohl: The Gold At The Starbow's End. This is a collection of stories, so naturally a little bit uneven. Two of the stories, the title one and "The Merchants of Venus", are novella-length. The title story is a bit outlandish in its premise--a group of astronauts are sent out to a fictitious planet, in hopes that in their spare time they will solve a number of scientific problems. While the Earth falls apart behind them, they progress much farther than anticipated. The other novella is set in the Heechee universe, and is a fairly straightforward of trust and betrayal on the surface of Venus. "Call Me Million", a ten-page story in the middle of the book, is probably the best story there, with "Sad Solarian Screenwriter Sam" and "Shaffery Among The Immortals" being more played for humorous effect.

Roger Zelazny: The Hand of Oberon. Another book that I read for the first time many years ago, and barely remember now. I read it as part of an omnibus, too, so I barely noticed when one book ended and another began. It's the fourth book in his Amber series, for anyone who doesn't know, and while it deals with some of the complications introduced in the series, it's building for a climax of sorts in the fifth book, the end of the original series. There's five more after that which I never have read, though I'm not sure if they're any good. I'm sure I'll try them.

Kevin O'Donnell, Jr.: Lava. Third book in his McGill Feighan series--one more was published, but the series was never finished. The first part of the book, dealing with "office politics" on Earth, was more interesting to me than the alien world he visited for the rest of the book. He found out a few more things about the Far Being Retzglaran, whose minions had warped his life, but not enough. And it's not like the next book will tie it up or anything. Well, I'll get around to it sometime, I guess.

And I'm done! The next book I read was Red Storm Rising. Whew. So, that's about five months worth of books for me. I just started The Dark Side of The Earth by Alfred Bester, another short-story collection, and I've got Charles de Lint's Spirits In The Wires and Dan Simmons's Ilium out from the library, so I've got my reading cut out for me.

This episode: Nick Danger stumbles endlessly on through...Alfvaen's 750 favourite songs!

283. Belinda Carlisle: You're Nothing Without Me, from Live Your Life Be Free

This is an interesting song, a little bit harder-edged than much of Belinda's work(no, really?). She's trying to play it cool while her lover leaves her, warning him about how horrible his life will be without her, but there's an undercurrent that she's really trying to make herself believe it. So, a caustic, bitter breakup song with a hint of underlying vulnerability. Yummy.

282. Massive Attack: Protection, from Protection

Fairly low-key trip-hop, with Tracy Thorn's warm vocals setting the tone for the song. Not as edgy as, say, "Safe From Harm", but effective nonetheless, as Thorn sings of dealing with feelings of being responsibly for other's safety and well-being.

281. Dire Straits: Why Worry, from Brothers In Arms

Mark Knopfler's near-whispered vocals and slight keyboard and guitar backing produce this near-lullaby, urging optimism in the face of anxiety.

280. Eurythmics: Conditioned Soul, from Be Yourself Tonight

The Eurythmics make the best of their full-band sound on this song, with soaring harmony and sturdy basslines on the chorus and Annie Lennox's edged vocals in the verses.

And that's that. Bleah. Sounding a little uninspired there, but what do you expect? It's late.

Pardon my circumlocutions, I seem to be soliloquizing.

2004-05-01T23:31:00.000-06:00

Hard On The Heels of Something Gold

Well, I haven't completely abandoned the blog, but it's come close. I have been posting desultorily in my LiveJournal, but this one has been more daunting.

I see now why people who use more than one journal often post increasingly infrequently to one or the other, or give each one a specific purpose. So I think that I will try to start using this one for, say, books and music posts, and leave the other one for everything else. Books and music are a big part of my life, which I have been sharing all too infrequently. But if you're interested in other stuff, then feel free to try the LiveJournal.

So, without further ado, let's get started on the books I managed to get through in the last five months or so...not all of them, but hopefully at least a month's worth:

Vonda N. McIntyre: Starfarers. I'm not sure what I was expecting of this one, but I don't think it quite worked for me. It was very definitely a setup for a series, but it didn't get much more accomplished than getting the series started. I only have the next book in the series, so I guess I'll give it one more chance to hook me. ...Whatever happened to Vonda McIntyre, anyway? It seems like ages since I saw much from her. Well, it looks like there was The Moon & The Sun, from 1997, after she finished the Starfarers series, but since? Maybe she went back to writing Star Trek books, where I wouldn't have noticed her. My eyes are very adept at skipping over that section of the shelves these days.

Iain M. Banks: The Use of Weapons. I've heard many good things about Iain Banks's "Culture" series, but I haven't read much of it. I'd read Consider Phlebas and Look To Windward, but I know there were a number in between. This one seemed to next in publication order, at least, so I picked it up from the library. It's the story of a man who was not born in The Culture, but was recruited by them to do their dirty work. The one thread follows a current mission he's on, and the rest follows his timeline backward to the original recruitment. In that way the book really devolves into a sequence of individual scenes. Some of them, like the time where he's badly crippled, but manages to signal for rescue by smearing bird guano over an island in a particular pattern, are mesmerizing, but others are less so. It's interesting, but hasn't sold me on the series yet.

John Morressy: A Voice For Princess. I've read other material in this series, like Kedrigern In Wanderland, and a few short stories in F&SF or someplace like that. This is really light fantasy of a type that may only have been publishable during the fantasy boom of the 80's. Not to say that it's bad, but it's got some of the texture of Jack Vance with some of the silliness of Craig Shaw Gardner. It does come off as charming rather than lame, but it's still a little bit light for my tastes.

Steven Brust: The Lord of Castle Black. Perhaps Steven Brust should be promoted to my list of buy-in-hardcover authors--which so far only includes Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin--but if so, I should have started with The Paths of The Dead, the first in the sub-series "The Viscount of Adrilankha". So I waited to get this one from the library. He continues on being delightful in the Dumas-esque tales written by the charmingly intrusive author Paarfi of Roundwood. Having only read "The Man In The Iron Mask" from Dumas's original "Viscount of Bragelonne", which this is drawing from, I can't see the parallels too clearly, but the next book should be getting there. Morrolan, well-known from the Vlad Taltos books but just getting introduced to Dragaeran society here, is the title character, and several important steps in his history are taken in this book. Not recommended to anyone who hasn't read at least The Phoenix Guards and the other intervening books, but to those I would simply recommend that you do read those books, then proceed to this one.

Dick Francis: Rat Race. Still working to catch up on Dick Francis's back catalogue, but it is seeming sadly more likely that Dick Francis may have stopped writing upon the death of his wife, so perhaps there's no hurry. This one was another air-taxi one, ground(so to speak)that he already covered in Flying Finish, but there's no sense of rehashing here. Another character, a pilot, with only a peripheral interest in horse racing, is drawn into that world when he ferries a famous jockey and they both are nearly killed. The characters and the plot seem to carry equal weight, and when the book ends, you miss the characters. And I will miss more of his characters if he doesn't write any more books...

Susan Elizabeth Phillips: Kiss An Angel. This is mostly a research book, actually. One of my works-in-progress seems likely to feature a circus in one part, so my wife recommended this to me. It's one of her romances, and contains a few elements that I find winceworthy, not being inured to some of the genre's conventions, but it does have some appeal beyond its informative value. Now I just need to get to that novel. Next year, perhaps.

Steve Lyons: The Time Traveler Trilogy Volume 1. I confess, I was a big fan of the Micronauts comics when they came out way back when, and I even had a few of the toys, long since gone. I always seemed to like the SF/fantasy comics better than the straight superhero ones, though it took me some time to realize that. "Micronauts" was uneven, but it had its moments, mostly when they forgot about going to Earth and encountering numerous guest stars, and just dealt with the Microverse. The "New Voyages" followup series was even better, a truly mature comic.

When a new Micronauts series came out, I tried a few issues, but it didn't grab me. Still, I picked up this book on impulse at the library, and decided to try it. Well, it wasn't that bad, but it wasn't really the same Micronauts, which was the same problem the new series had. They had most of the same characters--the ones based on actual toys--but the ones that Marvel had created for the first series were of course unavailable to the new publishers. The book seemed to be another level off, though. As far as I could tell, the events from the new comic books were an alternate reality that the main character, a human boy, was beginning to remember, so they didn't have to worry about plot crossover too much. He got drawn into events anyway, and by the end was trying to set about restoring things to the way he thought they should be. But I don't know if I'm really inspired to try to track down and read the next two.

C.J. Cherryh: Defender. I think this is fifth in the atevi series, and there's one more at least. It continues to be compulsively readable, with her best-drawn alien race to date and the human who almost belongs more with them than with his own race. He continues to try defusing tensions and misunderstandings, if not outright hostility, between the atevi and the people from the spaceship that left humans there centuries earlier. I won't be able to hold myself off from Explorer much longer...

Dean R. Koontz: The Face of Fear. A fairly tight thriller, in which a former mountain climber who retired because of paralyzing fear has to somehow manage to escape from a nearly-empty skyscraper when threatened by homicidal maniac. I admit that a few of the plot points have managed to escape my mind after four months, but it was very effective, and would probably film well.

Robert Jordan: New Spring. This one I did but in hardcover, even though I had read close to half of it in the novella from the Legends anthology. Was it worth it? I can't say yet, I'm too close to the series. It's a prequel from the Wheel of Time series, one of three that's apparently coming out over the next couple of years. On the one hand it's frustrating to think that it might be slowing down the interminable pace that the actual forward-plot books are coming out at, but they will probably be interesting to read in any case. And is it any better to do all the prequels after you've finished the first series? I'm thinking Terry Brooks here, though it's not like I've read any of the Shannara prequels...

And that's all I can manage for now...that takes us to January 16th, at least. Hopefully more soon.

I've thought a lot about this whole countdown thing. At the rate I'm going, two songs a post is seeming way too slow. When I posted every day, it would be fine, but at any pace I think I could sustain today... That's one reason I'm posting here so erratically.

So I will try to increase the pace a little bit. I haven't figured out how for sure yet, but it may involve triangular numbers. Though I don't want to actually do more than ten songs at a time...

Let's try three:

286. T'Pau: Heart & Soul, from T'Pau

Though I had heard their first album called "Bridge of Spies", that's not what my copy says. Anyway, I liked this song a lot when it came out, and I remember being disappointed, for some reason, when Madonna's execrable "Who's That Girl?" beat it to the #1 spot on the Canadian charts. The largest part of its appeal to me is the counterpoint between Carol Decker's spoken and sung vocal lines; the rest of it it solid pop, but not special. Decker's vocals carry the song to its heights.

285. Style Council: Have You Ever Had It Blue, from the Absolute Beginners Soundtrack

I found out later that this song was a relyricking and retitling of a song from their "Internationalists" album, with a more political tone to them. The lyrics on this version aren't anywhere near so pointed, but they strike more of a chord with their appeal to the experience of crushing disappointment. The album version contains an extended intro that the video version did without, and I don't think it's really necessary...but maybe if I saw it in the context of the movie it would work better, I don't know.

284. They Might Be Giants: Letter Box, from Flood

A slight piece from what I think is their best album, this song is mostly notable for the high-speed lyrics in the verse, which are often hard to decipher, and hard to reproduce when singing along, as I am wont to do. But they are delightfully by turns childlike and biting.

Stupid == the flying Wallendas without hands. --billbill

2003-12-11T21:42:00.000-07:00

A Secret Burning Thread

Apparently I took another month off. But that's only an illusion. I was actually working on NaNoWriMo, as my few LiveJournal entries at the beginning of the month might attest to.

In a nutshell, I did complete NaNoWriMo, writing 50,007 words towards my novel in the month of November, though unlike the last two times, the novel is not finished this time. We also acquired a second vehicle, which is proving to be quite convenient. Which I also mentioned in LiveJournal, redundantly even.

But right now I think it's time to go over the books I've read in the last month and a half or thereabouts.

When last I wrote, I was reading...Hybrids? Has it been that long? Well, I finished it, and I thought it was okay but not Sawyer's best, nor his worst either. It didn't feel like it had much of a plot, even though it had some tension near the end.

After that I read The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, by Louis de Bernieres, who I believe also wrote Captain Corelli's Mandolin, though I'm not sure. I read a lot of this on the bus, because this was when Nicole was in Medicine Hat with the car, and before we had our second vehicle. It was a bizarre book, reminding me more than somewhat of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years In Solitude, about a remote village full of bizarre characters. It also has some ugly things to say about religious fanaticism.

I spent a week and a half at the beginning of November reading Mary Stewart's The Last Enchantment. It wasn't filled with thrilling excitement or anything, and it didn't really pull me along. It had its moments, but not that many of them. Mostly, it seemed to have years. We don't actually have a copy of The Wicked Day, next in the series, and quite frankly I'm in no hurry to acquire one.

By contrast, I spent a cool two days reading each of my next two. First was Lemony Snicket's The Wide Window, third in the Series of Unfortunate Events. They are very amusing books, more for the authorial voice, and its constant explanations of words and phrases a young reader might not know. And, of course, it's a quick read.

Also surprisingly quick was Tanya Huff's Stealing Magic. It's a Tesseract Books collection of fantasy stories involving a couple of different characters. One of them is a lusty, earthy woman who happens to be the most powerful mage in the world. The other is a female thief who gets into a number of scrapes. I had read most of the former stories before, since they were reprinted in OnSpec magazine a few years ago, and they were mostly written for laughs. The thief ones were not always so light-hearted, and I found them quite inspirational for the portions of my NaNoWriMo novel involving a Thieves' Guild.

From there it was onto Tanith Lee's Gold Unicorn, sequel to Black Unicorn. They're both young adult novels, but with some interesting themes to them. They're not quite as deep or atmospheric as some of her other books, but she doesn't pull her punches all that much. I certainly didn't feel like she was writing for 'kids' as much as she was accurately portraying a girl in her teens in a fantasy world.

The entire rest of November--another twelve days--was taken up with Steven Erikson's Deadhouse Gates. This was not nearly so much of a plod as The Last Enchantment--it actually is that long, close to 1000 pages. And well worth it. It's the second in his "Malazan Book of the Fallen", and I just now realized that said book was actually mentioned in this volume. Heh.

Erikson's work, while epic in scope, continued to draw more on Glen Cook for inspiration than it does Tolkien. There are some decidedly Asian elements in this one--religious fanatics waiting for their prophet in the desert, and roving tribes on horseback. There a number of sets of characters moving about, sometimes intermingling, and a lot of interesting plot twists. It only involves a few of the characters from the first book--the rest will apparently take the stage in book three, Memories of Ice, which seems to be contemporaneous with this one. Probably even better than the first book.

After that, I wanted something a little shorter again. I moved on to Billie Sue Mosiman's Night Cruise. These days, Mosiman is a writer of vampire novels, but her earlier works were straight thrillers. This one is about a serial killer who picks up a young runaway as a 'witness' to his killings, which he has done several times before. This time, nothing goes quite as either of them plan. It's more psychological than really bloody, as you spend a lot of time inside the head of 'Cruise', the killer. It doesn't quite have the impact it could have had, especially the ending, and might have been served by being longer.

Finally, I reread Roger Zelazny's Sign of The Unicorn, third in the Amber series, just finishing that last night. I read the first five Amber books in a two-volume omnibus a loooong time ago--probably in high school, so at least fifteen years ago. I reread the first two a few years ago, but hadn't yet gone past that. The first one was always my favourite anyway, but I think I kind of got confused about what happened in the last three. So I'm rereading them, and while it can get a bit confusing keeping track of the thirteen Amber siblings(some of whom are dead, and some of whom are only presumed dead), I am once again intrigued. After rereading these I may go on to the second Amber series.

Now I'm reading Borderland, a shared-world anthology co-edited by Terri Windling. The Will Shetterly novel Elsewhere that I read a while ago is set in this universe, but apparently this one should have come first. Well, I'm reading it now. There's only four stories in this book, one of them by "Bellamy Bach", which they admit is a pseudonym, probably for Shetterly himself in this case. There's also a Charles de Lint story, an Ellen Kushner, and a Steven Boyett. So far I'm only in the second story, and the first story takes place some year earlier, so it's hard to say how much the world itself will jell.

I also read a few non-fiction and humour books in there. I just finished Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, which was an excellent introduction to string theory, taking me far beyond the vague memory of having heard about "seven dimensions curled up" for every point in space. A lot of the explanation in the text is done using three-dimensional or fewer analogues, so it only delivers some of the flavour of the full glory of Calabi-Yau manifolds and other esoteric mathematical devices. It's hard to me to gauge how accessible it makes the material, since I do have a Physics degree, but it uses a minimum of equations, and lots of helpful diagrams. And my eyes didn't glaze over once.

I'm sure there was more than that, but that'll have to do for now. Well, I know I read the latest Darwin Awards volume, and a few Worst-Case Scenario Survival Guides, but there's not much to say about those...

Lurching ever onward in that countdowny thing:

288. Prefab Sprout: Cue Fanfare, from Swoon

This is a peculiar song, as those from Prefab Sprout's first album tend to be, whose lyrics involve Bobby Fischer, among other things, and which has a bit of an edge to it that was often softened on later albums. It's fairly singable, if nothing else.

287. Suzanne Vega: The Queen & The Soldier, from Suzanne Vega

This was one of the first songs to strike me from Vega's debut album, with its fantasy-esque storyline. It's probably an allegory or something, but I was never good at that stuff. It seems to be one of the more "folky" of the songs on the album, though that can often be deceptive, with a synthesizer or two lurking in the background.

'Why, this is other people, nor are we out of it.'

2003-10-24T22:49:00.000-06:00

I'm Going Cheap

When my dad moved down to Edmonton a few months ago, he had a job at a furniture chain. They were opening up a new store, and he was to be sales manager. In the interim, he would work at their various stores throughout Edmonton as a salesman, to get acquainted with the store.

He has now quit, though. He was routinely working six day weeks, and sometimes seven. Since one of the reasons he wanted to move to Edmonton was to see more of his grandchildren, he wasn't happy with that, and the new store was not coming together on schedule either.

This is not an object of major concern. My dad has had many, many jobs in his life, most of them sales-related in some way, and by this point I imagine he has some job-hunting skills accumulated. My uncle, whose house he is sharing right now, has a lawn-maintenance company which can always use extra hands, so he's working there when the weather permits.

I found out some of this at lunch with him last week. He needed to borrow my car to get insurance for his new car. This is how little time he's had--he's had this car(which is my grandma's old car, because my aunt bought her a new car)for weeks now, but hadn't been able to get it ready to drive yet. I think he also had to pick up some stuff from his former office, because he left some stuff in my trunk that he couldn't carry on the bus.

Anyway, he said he might look for something a bit lower-key, like maybe a bookstore, or even something in the Farmer's Market. Not sure what precisely that's about, but I'm sure he knows what he's doing.

A few days later, I begin to notice an odd smell in the car. Mostly just when getting into it, and my nose quickly adjusted to it, but it was somewhat unpleasant and a bit annoying. It didn't smell like, say, burning automotive fluids, or anything car-related, but I wasn't sure. It smelled more like decaying food, and I wondered if something the kids ate in the car on the Thanksgiving drive had gotten under the seat or something. I never actually crawled around trying to locate it, though.

Yesterday my dad called me at work, asking at Simon's birthday party(he turns four on Sunday). He mentioned the stuff that was still in my trunk. And he asked if I'd thrown out the eggs yet.

Only then did I remember that he had mentioned some hard-boiled eggs from the fridge at his former office. He'd grabbed them with everything else when he left, and left them in a bag in the trunk. And he'd been worried that they might go bad...and start to smell. Of course. Rotten eggs.

Yesterday was the day that Nicole was driving to Wainwright, doing some school readings, and driving back. So of course she had the car. Her nose is not as sensitive, and she didn't seem to have noticed anything. When she got home last night, I remembered right away to check the trunk, and sure enough, there was a tupperware container with stinky eggs in it.

Already the car smells better.

I signed up for NaNoWriMo again this year, of course. How could I not? I waffled for a while about what I should be writing--a sequel to one of the last two novels? Something involving the Calgary-based superhero group led by Joe Clark, retired International Agent? Maybe some cosmic battle fought on higher planes of existence?

But I ended up deciding on another fantasy novel, in what I am tentatively planning to be a huge, sprawling umpteen-book epic series. Because, unlike some people, I like such things. In the NaNoWriMo forums, I got involved in a discussion of Robert Jordan, and all these people saying that they stopped reading the series in the third book, or the fourth book, or the seventh book, or the tenth book, or whatever, often because of frustration with the interminability of the series. For me, that's practically one of the selling points.

I'm cannibalizing two previous stories, which both seem to fit with the overall plot I have in mind while taking place far enough apart to be able to define the world almost by triangulation. The world, which one of the stories is already sort of set in, is something I built as a world-building exercise in the summer of '85 staying with my grandparents in Stettler. I've lost most of the notes I made, but I remember the highlights. There's a big decaying empire to the south, a big decadent Aztec-style empire to the east, and in the middle a sort of ithmus, like about a quarter of Europe, where everything else happens. I tossed in a bunch of cultures because they seemed like a good idea at the time, and I wanted all the AD&D races there, but whatever else, I have to keep the elves.

Anyway, I'm still trying to finish my Space Empires III game before the end of the month. I've still got a week, but it's a bit busy. This weekend will be taken up mostly by Simon's birthday--he turns four on Sunday--as well as Nicole's brother Wayne's, on Saturday.

Nicole's going down to Medicine Hat for some more readings on Tuesday, and that's a long enough drive that she will be going down Monday, and maybe staying overnight in Calgary on Tuesday instead of coming all the way back. To prevent logistical nightmares, the kids will be going back to the grandparents' in Beaumont, so I will essentially be on my own. I have a number of plans, the majority of which I know from experience I will not execute. But I will probably go to a NaNoWriMo get-together on Monday night, at a bar which is relatively near the office. The problem will be killing time in between, but I think I've decided that I will finally make some time to go down to the University library and check out that Dictionary of Minor Planet Nomenclature book. Tuesday night I will probably just go home and watch "American Beauty", which Nicole has no interest in watching. As long as I finish it in time to tape "24".

For some reason, since the end of summer we've gotten more TV stations than we used to. We cut back to basic cable a year or more ago, because we were mostly watching network programs, and didn't have much time to watch more. But now we're getting a whole bunch of channels again, and as far as I know aren't paying more. Mostly I've been trying to catch a few Star Trek:TNG reruns on "Spike". Tonight we were fortunate enough to catch "Dark Page", one of the few that we had never seen before, with Majel Barrett's best acting in the entire series.

The only new show we've really stuck to this year is "Coupling". I know, but I never saw the British version, and likely never will, and this seems to be going well enough. "The West Wing" doesn't seem to have changed too much for the worse, despite Aaron Sorkin's departure. I hope Gary Cole's character will get some airtime, because I tend to like him.

I finally managed to finish The Plains of Passage, despite forgetting to bring it with me for Thanksgiving. It wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, but it really could have had the prehistoric botany and zoology cut out into appendices or entire separate books. And sometimes Auel gets a little hamhanded with her characters. It had its moments, but I'm glad I'm finished it.

When I was up for Thanksgiving, I ended up reading Robert Sawyer's Iterations collection, which was a library book. I'd read several of the stories before, but quite a few were new to me. One of them, "Fallen Angel", didn't really work for me, but it was apparently inspired by a particular sculpture, and maybe seeing that would have made it work better. On the whole it was pretty solid, though.

After finished The Plains of Passage, I read another library book, Tricky Business by Dave Barry. Ever since reading Big Trouble, I was hoping he'd return to fiction, and he has, with admirable promptness for someone who is surely very busy thinking up booger jokes. I mean, honing his craft of humour. I think it holds up quite well with its predecessor, and proves the first book is not just a fluke. It has some almost harrowing moments to go with the madcap humour, and engenders some serious suspense, too.

Then I went on to Starfishers, the second book in Glen Cook's SF trilogy of the same name. The first one, Shadowline, was an almost straightforward military SF book, with two mercenary bands manipulated into opposing each other by the nasty human offshoot race, the Sangaree. The Starfishers proper, a mysterious group that live in deep space, are only a minor plot thread in the first book. The second book takes a quite different tack, following a spy sent to infiltrate the Starfishers, with a friend who turns out to be one of the survivors from the first book(maybe I should've noticed that earlier, but I'd forgotten his name). There are also Sangaree involved, but the book focuses on the main character, who has some problems because of frequent psych-conditioning into various cover identities. It jumps around a little bit in the timeline, as Cook often does, and the same character goes by different names, even in his own head, at different periods. I hope we see more of him in the third book, Star's End.

Now I'm reading another Robert Sawyer: Hybrids, the third in his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. It's another slow-paced book, like the last one. Sawyer does seem to be seriously proposing his "Neanderthal" world as a utopia, despite its lack of agriculture, universal electronic surveillance and recording, and ruthless eugenics program. It does ask some tough questions about humanity and our own cultures, though, and is often interesting.

I'm also making my way through I Have Landed, Stephen Jay Gould's final collection of articles on natural history. As usual, he seems to spend more time writing about scientists and philosophers than he does about science, but it's still fitfully interesting.

A couple of links to boost my ego a little bit:

First, there's a review of the Open Space anthology in "Challenging Destiny". About my story, it says "'The New Paranoia Album' by Aaron V. Humphrey tries to make some points about the power of pop culture in a fantastical story but it didn’t seem make as big an impression as it needed to." That's an interesting deduction on the part of the reviewer, about what my story was trying to do, though a bit misguided. Frankly, I wasn't "trying to do" much with my story, just entertain myself with a story which is more, really, about its main character's struggles with obsession than it is with the power of pop culture in general. But whatever, at least I got mentioned.*

Second, in a recent entry in "Cosmic Log", the author was talking about books related to solar flares. Mentioned was Thomas T. Thomas & Roger Zelazny's Flare, and I remembered having written a review of that back when I was actively reviewing books on rec.arts.sf.written, ten years or so ago. So imagine my glee at finding a link to a collection of reviews of the book, and my review being there! It's like a brush with fame or something. Oddly enough, that review is not up on the web with the rest of my reviews; I may have to remedy that now, and see what other ones I might have missed.

An exercise to the reader: at my current rate, at what date will I reach the top of my countdown? Don't neglect higher-order derivatives.

290. Fleetwood Mac: Never Going Back Again, from Rumours

This quiet acoustic number from the blockbuster album is one of the most striking, probably because of its very quietness, and the oblique lyrics.

289. Depeche Mode: Behind The Wheel, from Music For The Masses

The synth-driven beat to this song is the main attraction of it, with the lyrics just icing on the cake, following the usual Depeche Mode themes.

Balloons cost more when they're blown up. Well, that's inflation for you.

2003-10-06T22:33:00.000-06:00

This Hunger's Made Me Weak

See, what did I tell you--Space Empires III ate my brain. But it's starting to wind down now--the Aphsinx(that's me)long since wiped out the Baklad, and have been making good progress on the Vrok and the Tch'ickan. Declaring war on the Tch'ickan, unfortunately, may have turned the other large empire, the Certadsh, against me, and soon after that my longtime allies the Hevordah and the new empire that sprang up, the Welshra.

But now my ships are making headway in Certadsh space, the Welshra have been resubjugated(they originally formed on a Vrok planet that I had just subjugated with my troops--I guess they had been a subject race to the Vrok, and took advantage of the chaos to declare their independence), the Vrok themselves have only one tiny planet left, the Tch'ickan are nearly gone, and the Hevordah's fleet of numerous but tiny ships has been decimated. Now it's mostly bureaucracy, with the occasional space battle. The game will probably be over before I finish plumbing the remainder of the technology that the registered version has made available to me.

Anyway, I've had no shortage of things that I've thought of blogging about, only a shortage of time where I felt like blogging. Or even Livejournaling. I'll scrape up what I can now. I don't think that I'm going to feel like doing the Worldcon thing, though, surprise surprise, after over a month. There are a few things I might want to mention, but a day-by-day discussion is a bit too late.

So what else have I been up to?

I never believe those people who say you need to give your car an oil change every three months, or 5000 km, or whatever. For one thing, who are these people? They're the ones who run oil change places, so of course they want you to come in as often as they can get away with. I'm sure your car will run just fine if you bring it in every three months for an oil change, but will it run must worse if you only do it every six months? Every year? So I do it every year, just before Thanksgiving. (Which in Canada, as you may recall, is around the same time as Columbus Day in the States.)

Last year we were feeling a little guilty about under-maintaining our car, or something, so I got the absolute works. I was probably there for almost an hour while they flushed out everything they could flush. This year I was feeling a little more conservative, so I got mostly the basic, though still with a pricier synthetic oil.

They mentioned that my fan belt was looking a little cracked, and it should get fixed soon. I remembered them saying that last year, too, so I thought, okay, it's really time to get it done.

It's a pain to take the car in, though. We've just got the one, so it's a nuisance. You have to be sure it doesn't interfere with grocery shopping, or any out-of-town trips. Nicole's parents went on holiday, so we had to check on their place in Beaumont for a couple of weekends. And so on. I put it off, and put it off.

Then, last Tuesday, I was driving home from work, going up the hill out of the river valley onto Connors Road, and I happened to notice that the engine-temperature gauge on the dashboard was a fair bit closer to the "H" than it usually is. By the time I reached the top of the hill, it had reached the "H" and the dashboard was trying to call my attention to it more vigorously, using the "Check Gages"[sic] warning light. (I'm 90% sure that "gauge" is the correct spelling, not "gage" or [shudder]"guage". Actually, dictionary.com lists "gage" as a variant, and I guess that's okay; "gauge" really looks like it shouldn't have a long "a" sound. But I digress.)

Once I got off the hill I made a quick right turn into residentia and pulled over. I called Nicole on the cell and told her what was happening. The last time this had happened, we were down in Calgary for ConVersion, probably 2-3 years ago. I spent a long time waiting for Nicole to show up, and found out that on Deerfoot Trail it had started overheating, and she took it in to Canadian Tire. Luckily, she got to borrow her cousin Carla's SUV for the day, and it turned out to be just the thermostat. I didn't think I could assume it would be so simple this time.

Unfortunately, there were no Canadian Tires nearby, or near my way home at all, really, though there was one at Mill Woods Town Centre, a little past our house. I was still less than halfway home, though. I didn't want to drop the car off at some random garage if I could help it, either. So I decided I would try the slow way home--drive for five minutes, pull off the road and stop for five minutes to let the engine cool down. I crept fitfully down Connors Road, past Bonnie Doon mall, down to Argyll Road, and finally onto 75th Street, which is practically the home stretch. And then I saw a Midas.

Of course! Midas got their start as strictly a "muffler & exhaust" place, but now they do full service, and I've never been less than pleased with them. I pulled into their parking lot and walked into their office. I let them know about the engine troubles and thought, hey, while I'm here, I should get them to do the fan belt as well.

They didn't have anyone free to drive me home or anything, but there was a bus that went by. It turned out to be the 321, a peak-hours-only route of miniature van-sized buses. Luck was with me, because one showed up after only a couple of minutes, and I later discovered that they only came by every half hour.

Wednesday I rode the bus, which I hadn't done to our new office, but it turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. When I talked to the Midas folks that afternoon, they said it was the radiator(which they kept calling a "rad", but I assumed that was what they meant), and they'd have to replace it, for about $500. I reminded them of the fan belt(which somehow they had forgotten), and they said they'd do that as well--another $100. They said it should be ready about 5:00-5:30. I checked all my bus routes, and ended up getting there closer to 4:30 from some fortuitous connections.

They said they had it mostly done, radiator and fan belt replaced, and showed me the spongy, crumbly mess that my old radiator had become, which disintegrated at the touch of a finger. (I also discovered that the radiator didn't seem to be a round tank of fluid, as somehow I had always pictured it, but a metal lattice of vanes to, well, radiate heat over a larger surface area.) They just had a few more tests they wanted to run. Not a problem; I had a book to read, and they had reasonably comfortable chairs, even if they played the country station.

Half an hour later they had it up on the hydraulic lift again. Apparently the heater wasn't working, and the water pump didn't seem to be circulating the heat like it was supposed to. It had been working earlier, but was no longer. They had a few things they could try, though.

Half an hour after that, they said they wanted to keep the car another day. That day, I got a ride with one of the mechanics in his red sports car, and we ordered out for pizza.

Thursday I rode the bus again, and found out from Midas that they had to replace the entire water pump. They also replaced the timing belt, which wasn't in horrible shape but had a couple of tears, and which they'd had to take off to get at the water pump anyway. Another $650. My connections were not as smooth this time, and it was more like 5:00 when I got there...and they were running tests again. Luckily, these ones all turned out okay, and I got to drive it home. I deposited my paycheque(which I had been planning to do on Tuesday...), picked up some Subway, and drove home.

So far it's been running fine, maybe even a little quieter. I had some brief hope that it might have indirectly fixed my tape-deck problems, but it's still as flaky as ever. Ah, well.

Now, at least, I don't have to feel guilty about not checking the oil when I gas it up at a self-serve station--which is every time, except when we're on the highway. After an oil change, I can relax for a few months before I start worrying about it. Not actually doing anything about it, but worrying.

Holy crap, has it been an entire month since I updated on my books? Man.

It seems that last time I posted, I was reading A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold, which I finished quickly. It did have a little bit of SFnality, mostly due to the "butterbugs", but it was mostly enjoyable for its character-based plot. I am holding off from Diplomatic Immunity for the nonce. Since then we've had:

Sheri S. Tepper: Singer From The Sea. This book doesn't seem to have a whole lot that's new from Tepper. Society with oppressive males and oppressed females--check. Weird alien life forms--check. Gaian forces--check. Maybe the elements hadn't been combined in quite the same way, but they've all been in her other books.

Sometimes Tepper's near-strident feminism bothers me. It's not like she doesn't have sympathetic male characters, but they are almost never the ones who are in charge. It's too often the oppressive patriarchy. It keeps seeming to me(as, I admit, a white male)that they're complaining about evils that are already pretty much non-issues. Maybe it's my Generation-X background, but I just don't see that kind of phallocracy around. The "male oppressive patriarchy" is on the wane, which to me is good enough. Attitudes will die out when the people who hold them die, if they're not reinforced, and so that kind of feminism seems less and less relevant. But that's just my take, of course. Still, Tepper's preoccupation with it is as annoying in its way as Jack L. Chalker's nearly-monotonous occupation with themes of physical and mental change imposed from without. Chalker is already sliding down from my list of favourite authors, and I would hate to see Tepper follow.

Robert Charles Wilson: Blind Lake. His new hardcover, which we got from the library. Nicole and I have been reading his books fairly avidly since Mysterium, probably, or maybe even A Bridge of Years, and while they have their moments, they never quite manage to hold together. But he does seem to be improving, and this book I think is his best so far. Nicole didn't like it as much as the Wilson's last one, The Chronoliths, which had a better beginning, but while this one starts slow, it carries off a conclusion much better than Wilson's usual. Usually that's where he falls down, you see, in tying everything up, or explaining the enigma that has been central to the book. Here the closing revelations are far from a letdown, and there are a number of intermediate mysterious resolved as well, so it's very satisfying. This should definitely go on the Aurora, or, heck, Nebula, lists for next year.

John Brunner: The Stone That Never Came Down. This is a book I read years ago, that I grabbed off the shelf to reread pretty much on impulse. It's one of Brunner's most optimistic books, in a way. Admittedly, its premise is that the human race is unlikely to survive without a fundamental change in its way of thinking, but luckily, in the book, such a change comes a long, in the form of a "viral chemical" called VC. VC is an experimental drug which enhances human perceptivity and memory, and turns out to be contagious through blood transfusion.

So in a near-future(well, alternate history, these days)where Europe is crumbling under unemployment, fundamentalism, and the threat of war, suddenly a growing group of people from different backgrounds become clear thinkers, and agree that the best thing to do is to spread this clear thinking to the rest of the world. So they proceed to deploy VC in edible form to trouble spots, and everybody lives happily ever after.

If I ever become omnipotent, I tell you, that is what I'm going to do. Infect the human race with something that will make people's thinking more...well, more mature. I often define maturity as "the ability to take a large number of things into account at once". A child will reach for something not caring that they've just been told not to. A teenager might take something if they think they won't get caught. And adults are often encumbered with preconceptions, prejudices, and sloppy thinking. What would happen if people no longer had the ability to ignore things? Some might not be able to cope with it, perhaps, but in general I think the world would be a better place to live.

Joyce Cool: The Kidnapping of Courtney Van Allen And What's-Her-Name. This is a young-adult book that Nicole had, probably from her own girlhood. The main character ends up hanging out with a spoiled rich girl, and then they get kidnapped. It's mildly wacky, with some things that you couldn't get away with in these post-Generation-X days. It's all played for comedic effect--not a lot of real tension, because even the kidnappers are goofy. Not in Gordon Korman's league by any means, but a nice quick read.

Samuel R. Delany: The Ballad of Beta-2. One of a bunch of Delany books I bought years and years ago upon reading the wonderful Babel-17. They've been fairly spotty, with the sprawling and uneven Dhalgren, the almost incomprehensible The Einstein Intersection, the readable misfit-in-utopia Triton, the space-operatic Nova, the lackluster Tales of Neverÿon, and the intriguing Fall of The Towers. But this one, which, perhaps tellingly, is earlier than Babel-17, is a small gem.

A budding sociology major is forced by an unsympathetic professor into a detailed study of the titular ballad, one of few lasting works coming from a group of generation ships launched just before the invention of hyperspace made them obsolete. The ships' occupants have been mostly quarantined on their ships ever since. The student starts off making a perfunctory effort, and becomes more and more intrigued the more he finds out, right up until the very end.

Linda Haldeman: Esbae:A Winter's Tale. I have never been quite sure whether Linda is related to Joe or Jack Haldeman, but that's not important. This is a short little urban fantasy--well, collegiate fantasy, really. It takes place on a college campus, in a college town, featuring college students and college professors, with good and evil spirits thrown in for spice. I couldn't help wondering how similar the female protagonist was to the author, which is also not important, I suppose. The plot works itself out well enough, I suppose, but it's not a stellar book.

Robert Charles Wilson: The Perseids & Other Stories. I had requested this one from the library at the same time as Blind Lake, for some reason, but decided to put some space between them. The stories are an odd bunch, mostly set in Toronto, and most featuring a particular used bookstore, though often only in a cameo way. It's not Newford by any means, though. The stories are, perhaps, a little bit more successful in their resolutions than Wilson's novels, but still a bit spotty, especially "Pearl Baby", which didn't work for me. The stories are strongly character-driven, with speculative elements playing a role but not always dominating them. Worth a look, though.

Crawford Kilian: Gryphon. This was the book I was reading the first day I took the bus. I get a lot of reading done on the bus, and this wasn't that long a book, so I finished it that night. It didn't start out that promising, with a couple of spoiled-seeming kids in a near-Utopian future Earth, but it quickly picks up. The stakes escalate in a way that somehow reminded me of Eric Nylund's Signal To Noise, and by the end I was completely enthralled. Not quite as stellar as his epic Eyas, but a high point in his oeuvre nonetheless.

Spider Robinson: Callahan's Con. From the second day I took the bus. I wasn't sure whether I should try this book out or not, since the major disappointment of Callahan's Key, but after kitten's recommendation at Worldcon(which I will explain later), I thought I'd check it out from the library. It moved pretty fast, as the Callahan books tend to do, brought in a few older characters, even some unlikely ones, while leaving some out. This is actually one reason the book works better than the last one--the de-emphasis on the mind-numbingly powerful allies the denizens of Callahan's have acquired. Also, they are concerned with not calling attention to themselves from any large government organizations. There is also the touching death of one of the series regulars, which evokes real pathos. So, a welcome return to form.

Peter Ward & Donald Brownlee: Rare Earth. A non-fiction book that was recommended in one of the Worldcon panels I attended. It offers an interesting look at the fledgeling science of "astrobiology", the study of life on planets. It makes a case for the Rare Earth Hypothesis, which is that while bacterial life is likely common in the universe, given its long history on Earth and exploitation of seemingly hostile niches, multicellular life is likely exceedingly rare.

According to the Rare Earth theory, animal life requires such diverse elements as placement of a star in the correct area of its galaxy, correct composition so planets form at all, but also radioactives for plate tectonics, a large moon so its axis doesn't shift too often, the right kind of star so that it remains habitable for a long enough period, and an absence of nearby supernovas or planet-sterilizing asteroids. In addition, it may require the whole planet to freeze over more than once, frequent mass extinctions, and a Jupiter-sized planet in a stable orbit.

It seems to me that the authors are almost too eager to take anything odd about the history of Earth, or even weird theories(like the Snowball Earth where the whole thing freezes over), and make a virtue of necessity. Maybe it's just that it's hard to accept the idea that we only exist on this planet, as sentient animal life, because of a mind-numbing series of coincidences resulting in just enough water(but not too much), just enough heat(but not too much), just enough asteroid collisions(but not too much), just enough radioactives in the core(but not too much), etc.

I don't think it'll necessarily stop alien races from showing up in SF for a long time to come, but that's because alien races make good story elements. Asimov's Foundation series, where there are no alien races to be found, becomes almost more plausible.

Right now I'm reading Jean Auel's The Plains of Passage. It's not really pulling me along, since it contains some bad writing, and winceworthy segments where the author(not either of our protagonists, oh no)drones on and on about indigenous planet and animal species, and uses intensely anachronistic words like "protein" in doing so. When things are actually happening, it's okay, but Ayla and Jondalar's thought processes are far from profound, and their dialogue rarely more so. There is no plot, really--this falls mostly into the category of "Milieu" novel, with people wandering around discovering things.

Well, I'll try to read it, and if I get stuck, I will give up. I've done it before, on rare occasions, when it's warranted. I've got the new Dave Barry novel out from the library, as well as a Robert Sawyer short story collection, Iterations, so I don't have time to read too much dreck.

On to the glacially slow-moving countdown:

292. Bruce Cockburn: Anything Can Happen, from Big Circumstance

It took me a while to get into this album, and to discover the album closer, one of Bruce Cockburn's rare funny moments. Over a jazzy background, he speculates on all the ways he and his lover could die, and then uses this to clarify why he doesn't want to say goodnight. Always good for a smile.

291. Suzanne Vega: Undertow, from Suzanne Vega

Another great song from Vega's first album, which has no shortage of them. Unfortunately, and embarrassingly, that makes it hard for me to pick out a distinguishing feature to discuss here. Oh, well.

I like you, but I wouldn't want to see you working with subatomic particles.

2003-09-11T23:33:00.000-06:00

My Work Has Only Begun

I wasn't planning on blogging tonight, but my new Space Empires III registration key has not arrived(yes, I broke down and registered my first piece of shareware ever). My current empire was close to the limit of the technologies available in the unregistered version, so I want to get my registration key before I play further in that one. But in spite of the email saying "Orders are generally fulfilled very quickly, however, please allow up to 24 hours.", it's been close to 48 hours. I don't want to seem importunate, but I don't know how much longer I should be giving the guy(s) at Malfador Machinations to process my order... Surely if there was a problem with my Visa purchase, they would've gotten back to me already.

I have a few other saved(abandoned, really)games of SEIII, but I just can't manage to make myself play any of them. I'm trying to tell myself I shouldn't try to start a new game, even with all of the new alien race and star system names I've added, which won't show up in any of the old games. And somehow nothing else is appealing to me.

So, here I am blogging. Aren't you glad?

Back to Worldcon. Finally, starting with Friday morning.

To try to save a bit of money, we decided to try to bring something for our breakfasts. Something that we didn't have to refrigerate, since our hotel didn't provide us with a fridge. Not to mention something that we could bring on the plane with us. We settled on some "cereal bars". So we broke our fast with those, and then wandered down to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to see what was going on.

I think I checked for Kaffeeklatsch signup sheets, but they weren't there yet. I hadn't even heard of those, as a Worldcon feature, until B.J. passed us a copy of Mike Resnick's notes on attending one's first Worldcon. Apparently a number of authors are scheduled to have an intimate chat(with or without coffee)with whatever dozen or so people sign up first. Later, reading some Worldcon commentary, I realize that you really have to line up early for some of these ones.

The 10:00 panel we wanted was called "Never Say You Took A Creative Writing Course!", and was on the topic of what to put in, and what to leave out of, cover letters. The panelists were editors and agents, and one of the reasons we went to the panel was because Jim Minz of Tor Books, who had been Nicole's editor for Running On Instinct, was there. The consensus was that magazine editors don't care about cover letters, book publishers might want to get an idea about previous publications and what kind of book you've written, and agents want to know enough to let them decide whether you have a good writing career ahead of you, but never over a page.

Nicole did introduce herself to Jim Minz at the end, and he gave us an invitation to the Tor party that night. This was, we had been told, the reason to go to conventions--to go to the parties and meet authors, agents, and editors. So this was a first step.

After that(as far as I can tell from the pocket schedule, anyway)we went to the first of two George R.R. Martin readings from A Feast For Crows, the fourth book "A Song of Ice And Fire". According to Locus's most recent "forthcoming books" list, it was supposed to be published in September, but given that according to Mr. Martin himself it wasn't even finished yet, that didn't seem likely. I was looking forward to trying to get a signed copy, but oh well. He gave us a choice of four chapters, and we picked the Jon Snow one. It was pretty good.

At noon Nicole had to go up to the signing area, which we eventually found at the back of the dealer's room on the second floor. I grabbed each of us a sandwich from the little cafeteria, brought Nicole's hers and sat down to eat mine. Then I went to get autographs from Nicole's fellow scheduled authors, Suzy McKee Charnas and Eric Raymond. Being forewarned, I had brought Charnas's The Vampire Tapestry(which I hadn't read, but it contained "Unicorn Tapestry", which I had read in an anthology), and Raymond's The New Hacker's Dictionary. ESR was busy typing away on his laptop(Blogging? Hacking? Writing? I wonder), so a minimum of personal contact was made.

I browsed around in the dealer's room, but didn't find anything I couldn't resist buying. I'm very able to resist hardcovers and trade paperbacks, even signed ones, and few of the paperbacks were that tempting. Forget about memorabilia and action figures. I wandered over to the art show(where they made me check my camera at the front desk), didn't see Jim Beveridge's stuff there yet, or much at all, really. I'm not that much into art. So I was back picking up my camera about five minutes later.

After that we split up. I had been very curious about the Alien Languages Workshop, which was supposed to have limited attendance, though I hadn't seen a signup sheet. I went there anyway, and discovered that it wasn't quite that organized. That is, there may have been supposed to be a signup sheet, but there wasn't. There also was supposed to be a flip chart or something, but there wasn't. The panelists were Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog(and apparently an amateur(?) linguist), and Laurence Schoen, father of the Klingon language. The panel itself was mostly just a primer into linguistics, so I could practically have skipped it, because I was mostly up to speed on that. We eventually got a flip-chart substitute, in the form of a large pad of paper you can tear off and stick to the wall...

Then the panel was split into two groups, called "Purple" and "Green" on the program, but which Stanley and Laurence called "Porcupines" and "Squids". I started out as a Squid(Stanley's group), but then a Porcupine came over and said their room was almost deserted, so I moved over there. In the end we both had more than enough people, though.

Then we tried to come up with a "Porcupiny" language, which occasioned much debate. Laurence was adamant that we stick to something we would be able to pronounce, no fancy Klingon-style uvular consonants, no tones, etc. We decided porcupines would talk very circularly, anxious not to offend each other, and wouldn't use sibilants because they would be lost under the sound of rattling quills. We ended up with six consonants(plus two glides)and three vowels, for a very agglutinative language with lots of prefixes. We also had a standard word list which we were supposed to populate, though it seemed a bit artificial to me. We ended up(even with two hours)running a bit short on time, so we just each got assigned two words to create. We dubbed our race the "Kaglapglap", which meant "Those who stay[in one place]". On Saturday there was supposed to be a "First Contact" panel, but we weren't sure what that would involve.

From there(after three hours of alien language immersion), I headed to "Design Issues of Star Systems". That was kind of interesting, with panelists from Larry Niven(who of course was known to make up his own star systems, most famously Ringworld, of course)to people who actually worked on the projects dedicated to discovering extrasolar planets. Apparently they are planning to launch some kind of interferometry device(in a decade or so)to make it easier to detect planet-sized objects, like Earth-sized objects, in other systems. They are aware that up to now there is an observation bias towards large planets, mostly trans-Jovian ones, but they hope to overcome that. They discussed some limitations on planets in multiple star systems, which I found interesting. But, in a nutshell, they don't have any other complete solar systems to compare to our own, so we still can't tell how typical or outlandish ours is.

After that, Nicole and I met up again, and we decided to go out to supper, even though it was only 5:00. None of the programming looked really compelling for the rest of the evening. We walked over to East Side Mario's, which was quite close by(and familiar, because they opened one in Edmonton). (Hey, at least we didn't go to the Planet Hollywood at the base of the CN Tower...) At about 5:45, I suddenly noticed that the signing session for Open Space had been supposed to start at 5:00...oh, well, too late.

We went back to our hotel room and kicked back for a couple of hours--I was trying hard to finish the last book of Tad William's "Otherland" series at the time--and then headed out again close to 9:00, for the Royal York, to check out the parties.

We remembered something about the Tor party starting at 10:00(though I think we were mistaken), so we looked around for something else. I was interested in checking out the Kansas City 2006 Worldcon bid, mostly because I thought I might meet someone there who knew Marie Loughin, an old net.friend. (And I think I saw Glenn Sixbury's name on the programming list, another Kansas writer I remember Marie talking about...) But I chickened out, and instead we wandered into a "Song of Ice And Fire" party. I bought a T-shirt, "Winterfell: Westeros 2005", which I'm still not quite sure what it meant. I guess Winterfell was bidding to host the Westeros SF convention in 2005... It was a bit noisy(though later I would think back on it as blessedly quiet), but we found some chairs, and sat down and chatted with a guy who introduced himself as Ernst, and pressed free copies of "George R.R. Martin's The Hedge Knight" comic adaptation on us. He talked about some of the other comic projects he had lined up, which sounded pretty cool, and we talked about other SF/fantasy series for a while. It turns out that Ernst is Ernst Dable, Editor-In-Chief of Roaring Studios, who are producing the series for Image Comics. Definitely have to check those out next time I'm in Warp 1 Comics.

(I just got around to checking out westeros.org, which seems to be sort of like "Dragonmount" for ASOIAF.)

At close to 10:00, we thought we'd head up to the Tor party, which was up on the 8th floor of the hotel...out of the "party floor" area, so we thought it might be a little more private/intimate. Ha.

The hallway outside the room was already pretty populated, and we could hear the colourful roar of many conversations going at full blast. Inside the suite itself, it was packed. It was possible to navigate, carefully, from place to place, and we did manage to go over to the food table in just a couple of minutes. But it was just too much. We should've tried to mingle, or maybe even schmooze, but we didn't see anyone there we knew that we could talk to, and neither of us was very good at introducing ourselves to strangers. If Jim Minz was anywhere around, we didn't see him. So we made a strategic withdrawal. So much for the big "publisher's party" opportunity. Maybe for extroverts, but not for us. "Pop" go all the bubbles of talking to authors whose books I like(not like those bubbles contained much in the way of rational conversation on my part anyway).

We made our way down to B.J. & Ann's room instead. The night before, they'd said that Mike Resnick was going to be reading some of his stories there at about 11:00. It was probably closer to 10:30, but there was several people there anyway, so we hung out there. I can't remember who all was there, but some subset of our writer's group complement, at least, so we had people to talk to in a low-pressure kind of way. There were also a couple of women in belly-dancing costumes, whom I had seen around the Con(e.g. in the dealer's room earlier).

Mike arrived in due time, and had three stories to read, two humorous and one serious. One was a Lucifer Jones story, one in another series I forget, with a P.I. in a magic-based world, and the serious one was an African alternate history. They were all pretty good; all recently sold, I believe, too.

And in between the stories there was belly-dancing. They had music, and they obviously had done some practicing. At that point in the evening, it felt highly surreal.

After that, we went back to our hotel(taking the much shorter John Street route, rather than the long, dark and scary Spadina Avenue one)and crashed.

Crawling a little further up the charts:

294. This Mortal Coil: Strength of Strings, from Filigree & Shadow

I have since learned that this song was a cover of a Gene Clark(ex-Byrd)song, but I still like this one better than the original. I've lost my liner notes for this album, so let me do a quick net search to see if I can find out who's singing... Okay, according to this page, it's Dominic Appleton, whoever he is. ...Apparently he's from a band called Breathless, who sounds kind of interesting, have to check them out. Anyway, the song has a wonderful sense of menace, especially from that eerie sound sample at the beginning.

293. Rush: Afterimage, from Grace Under Pressure

A wonderful song about trying to deal with the death of a good friend, and being confronted with memories at every turn. This album is among Rush's best at combining guitars and synthesizers, as evidenced on this song.

When all you've got is lawyers, make lawyerade. --d.

2003-09-09T23:38:00.000-06:00

No More Excuses; Decisions Are Final

My morning started off with a bang today.

Well, actually, it started off restful enough. It was Nicole's morning for the children, but I got up at 7:00 as is my wont anyway, to spent a quiet hour at my computer. Mostly making up lists of ship-model-names for Space Empires III. (For which I've just broken my decade-long ban on shareware game registration.)

For breakfast I had my semi-usual bowl of Quaker-brand Life cereal. I've been eating that for many years now, as a happy medium between the "healthy" cereals and the "sweet" cereals. Every once in a while I get sick of it, but as long as I switch off with something else, I'm usually okay.

Usually, though, I don't see something black floating in my cereal bowl after I've had a few spoonfuls. Even less frequently so I notice that the black thing has little legs, which are moving to keep it from drowning.

EEEEWWWWW! A BUG! IN MY CEREAL BOWL!

I cannot stand bugs. I cannot deal with bugs. A bug that(it occurred to me later)I came close to putting into my mouth... No. I had a major case of the willies in the hallway while Nicole more-or-less calmly disposed of it, and the former contents of my cereal bowl.

I got out a clean bowl, and a clean spoon, and poured myself another bowl. A few unenthusiastic bites into that one, it occurred to me that a)the bug may not have been alone in the cereal box, b)the bug may have laid eggs or something in the box, and/or c)the bug may have polluted the contents of the box with its feces. Another bowl of cereal went in the garbage/down the drain. And the rest of the box, which luckily wasn't too much. (How much of that had I eaten unawares before now?)

I had some nice toaster waffles instead. Which put me a bit behind, but I didn't want to skip breakfast entirely.

Ew. Bugs. <shudder>

I was planning to continue my Worldcon memoirs sometime soon, but it's been low on my time allocation list. I will, however, fill in a couple of things I forgot to mention in my Thursday coverage.

First of all, when we were talking to Jim Beveridge, he told us about growing up in southern Ontario, and spending his summers working at the amusement park on Bob-Lo Island. This was the same Bob-Lo island that I wrote about last summer, which we tried to visit while down there for my brother's wedding. We had to inform him that these days, rather than hosting an amusement park, it is now an upscale gated island community. But it was interesting to run across it again...

Secondly, I forgot what it was we had been doing between registration and going up to B.J. & Ann's hotel room. A look at the "pocket schedule" would have enlightened me, but I didn't think we'd gone to anything... We had, though, gone to the Spider & Jeanne Robinson musical performance in the ballroom of the Royal York.

I'd seen Spider before, briefly, at ConText '91 in Edmonton. He'd been scheduled for a musical performance then, in one of the con rooms, but decided at some point to sing in the bar, instead. This proved to be a mistake, because the bar was full of people who were not expecting Con programming, and were drinking and smoking and talking instead. And Spider was insufficiently amplified, if at all. So after trying for a few songs to hear him over the roar, we gave up.

This was somewhat better, at least soundwise. Spider is a passable musician, sings pretty well, plays the guitar not too badly. His songwriting skills are also passable. I'm trying not to damn too much with faint praise, but let's face it, Spider is a better SF writer than he is a musician. He's a good SF writer, he's a fair musician. That's all there is to it. His musical tastes also do not intersect with my own that strongly, being more into folk and blues.

But it was an enjoyable session, and the patter was witty--Spider is, admittedly, a pretty good comedian. The seating was a little haphazard--people moved their chairs out onto the dance floor from the tables along the sides. So if you wanted to sit down, then generally you had to get your own chair, then find somewhere to put it in the rough semicircle around the platform Spider was performing from.

I don't think we stayed for the whole performance, either, because Nicole was getting restless by that point...and I was, as I said, less than entranced.

Friday later, I promise.

Racing up the charts:

296. Tragically Hip: New Orleans Is Sinking, from Up To Here

I've always found the Tragically Hip a bit uneven. They are(or were)huge here in Canada, if apparently more of a cult phenomenon elsewhere. This was one of the few songs of theirs that I actually liked right off the bat. The lyrics are, like most of their songs, a little impenetrable, but dark and blurred enough to go with the music of the song.

295. Go Four 3: Death of Love, from Go Four 3

Another song from my favourite obscure independent band of the 80's, this one from their six-song debut EP. It has a brooding feel to it as well, and would probably go nicely with "New Orleans Is Sinking".

We promptly judged antique ivory buckles for the next prize.

2003-09-07T22:06:00.000-06:00

Tie Another One To The Mast

Before I lose my momentum utterly, let me try to capture my Worldcon experiences. In writing, as I generally failed to do on film. I think we took a whole two pictures of the thing.

Starting with day 1, which would be Thursday the 28th. (I haven't turned my calendar page yet, because that way it's easier to look up the dates for this. Yeah, that's it.)

We got up, and got the kids up, early, and took them down to Nicole's parents' house in Beaumont. I'd taken Wednesday afternoon off(it would've been the whole day, but we were working on a big data conversation at work, and I thought the extra half-day would be appreciated), so most of our packing had been done then. Then Nicole's dad drove us to the airport, so that we could leave our car in the garage and not pay for parking. Beaumont is halfway to the Edmonton airport anyway, so we didn't lose much time there. And the boys didn't seem heartbroken at our departure.

There was a big lineup at the Westjet counters, extending around the corner, but it moved pretty fast, because they had about twenty wickets open, and generally each group of passengers took up more room than a single person. We ended up behind the wing, and on the aisle, but together, at least. We went through security, which seemed a little bit more thorough than it had been for our last plane trip, last summer, but not tremendously annoying. Of course, we weren't crossing the border or anything. Then we sat down in our departure lounge.

Soon we saw Ann from our writer's group, who came and sat with us for a bit. She was sitting further back, unfortunately, and told us there was some trouble with her Worldcon membership. She was on the programming schedule, but they couldn't find her actual Con membership...

On the plane, our window-seat companion was a guy in a cowboy hat, which didn't fill me with much confidence. He also kept talking to us--mostly to Nicole, who was sitting next to him. But later, seeing that I was reading Tad Williams and Nicole had a clipboard(where she kept the notes for the panel she was going to be on), he asked if we were going to Torcon too. It turned out that he was Jim Beveridge, an artist who has done a number of illustrations for OnSpec magazine, doubtless among others. Not being good with art in general, I don't know which were his, but I definitely recognized his name. So we chatted intermittently and amiably.

He had a digital camera, which he used to take a number of pictures of cloudscapes, since it was pretty cloudy throughout the trip. I can't help wondering if any of those will turn up in his art anytime soon. The flight attendants discouraged him from taking them during takeoff and landing, because while a digital camera is not a cell phone, it might still fall into the category of "suspect electronic device that may interfere with cockpit instruments somehow". Maybe they'll clear that up in future.

The plane trip passed quite peacefully, probably due to the lack of children accompanying us. Even debarking was, by comparison, a delight. Only one piece of checked luggage, and one real carry-on. We also had a lunchbag containing, well, our lunch, since Westjet does not serve more than a few in-flight snacks, but my backpack, stuffed with books for reading(always more than I will ever get to)and signing(I really restrained myself here, mostly to those who would actually be in the signing area at the same time as Nicole).

At the terminal, we decided to opt for the shuttle bus to the downtown hotels, rather than springing for a cab. I can't remember whose idea that was, whether Jim's or Ann's(who we rendezvoused with at the baggage carousel). We bought tickets for it, and then waited a little while until it came. It had the most annoying beeping going on while the baggage compartments were open, I recall(being more like a Greyhound bus than a transit bus), which really wore on us after a while. Jim sat ahead of us, and Ann across the aisle.

We started at Terminal 3 of Pearson Airport, and the shuttle bus apparently went from there to Terminal 2, where more passengers got on and more baggage was loaded to more infernal beeping. Then we got out into a desolate land of highways and interchanges, which reminded me of, well, the airport scene near the end of "Speed". Although we did not have speed. We crept along a construction-riddled road until, finally, we reached Terminal 1. Somehow we thought we'd skipped it and were already heading to downtown, but no such luck. It was, by this point, half an hour at least since our arrival at Pearson.

Finally we headed towards Toronto, where the Holiday Inn was by no means the first stop. It was probably an hour after our plane touched down before we were in our hotel room.

Con scheduling for Thursday had seemed pretty light, so we'd decided to meet up with my brother Steve and his wife Kelly for supper. Steve having been laid off a few months earlier, his original plans to obtain a Con membership too were doubtful. Just as we were about to phone him, though, having found no messages at checkin, he phoned us. Kelly had a doctor's appointment at a hospital near downtown, and Steve was still waiting for her. He'd call us when she was done, and then we could get together for supper.

This didn't really leave us enough time to go down to the Royal York hotel, where the Thursday Con activities were set, to pick up our membership packages or anything. So we waited in our hotel room, until Steve called to say they were in the lobby. They came up to our room, and then we realized that was silly and we went down to the lobby.

It was close to 7:00 by this time, which was only 5:00 Alberta time so we weren't that hungry, but we wanted to get adjusted to Toronto time. Steve had apparently managed to talk to someone at NOW Magazine, a Toronto arts weekly or something, and get a press membership in the Con. Sweeeet. He wanted to catch the opening ceremonies at 8:00. Kelly said she knew a place called "The Marché" or something like that, which had fast service.

It was a few blocks walk away, and then when we got there we kept walking past windows of the restaurant, and doors which told us to keep going. Finally we had to go into a weird shopping centre, which seemed to have been constructed over two existing buildings, and into the restaurant that way. The way the restaurant was set up was that you got your tray and wandered between the various food kiosks within it, and picked out what you wanted. Which, it seems to me, might have been fast service at each individual kiosk, but as newbies we wasted a lot of time wandering around, trying to find something we wanted to eat, that didn't have too long a lineup(as it seemed to be a trendy place), it didn't end up being that fast. We just ended up doing most of the service ourself, like we could be our own waiters or something.

I found my food first and finished it first. Steve took a long time to get back--probably had a long line. So by the time we were done(and we chose the slow lineup at the cashier, too), it was much past 8:00. We bid our farewells to Kelly, who was not partaking in the Con, and made our way to the Royal York, by which time the ceremony was pretty much over. We stood in what seemed like a long line, stretching all the way down the hallway, for our memberships, but soon I realized that there were actually two lines, which met in the middle at the membership office.

Steve had already picked up his press pass at a different hotel, which he tried to steer us to, but I was confident of the Royal York, and was proven right. (Ha!) So Steve mingled and started gathering material. After we had our materials, we sat down on one of the many comfortable seats available on the Royal York mezzanine and reviewed it. Nicole saw a promising-looking panel on "R&D In Magic" which there was still ten minutes or so left in. Then we saw Ann and Barb(well, one of the Barbs from our writer's group; hereafter, I will call her B.J. to minimize confusion)at the elevators, got their room number, and promised to stop by later.

Nicole did stop in for the last bit of that panel, and apart from that I can't remember much until we went up to B.J.'s room. Ann had said that Barb(the other Barb, Ann's niece, I think)had thought she was booking a suite, but instead they just had a room with two double beds, for four of them(Barb's girlfriend Elizabeth was there too). B.J. and Ann were good friends of Mike Resnick, from CompuServe originally and also from many previous Cons. Mike Resnick(a.k.a. Bwana)has a whole email list of his friends, and many of them were at the Con as well.

When we went up to the room, B.J., Ann, Barb and Elizabeth were there, as well as Josepha Sherman, a writer friend of Ann and B.J.'s, Mike, and a couple of other people I don't remember being introduced to(or have forgotten being introduced to, one or the other). I haven't read any Josepha Sherman books--maybe a short story or two, I don't know--so I wasn't intimidated at talking to her. One of my first experiences with a real live New York Jewish accent(I don't know how else to characterize it--Brooklyn?). We hung out for a little bit, I showed off my copy of the Open Space anthology, and then we wandered back to our hotel.

We had gone to Mapquest and mapped out a few sites before we left home, but somehow the Royal York was not one of them. We passed the Convention Centre on our way, so we knew more or less where we were, but we couldn't remember where we needed to turn.

Oddly enough, even with my penchant for naming things, I like numbered streets. We had them in Grande Prairie and we have them in Edmonton. There's never any ambiguity. Addresses identify which street and avenue they are on, and even which side of the street if you can remember which is odd and which even. Streets go north-south, and avenues go east-west. It all works. Places like Toronto, and Vancouver, with their plethora of named streets and avenues, with no convention as to which go which way, are as impenetrable to me as suburbia. That is, they need time to learn.

We knew that our hotel was on King Street, but King Street and Front Street didn't intersect. We crossed a number of streets, and finally hit Spadina Avenue, which I remembered specifically from our map. It was pretty dark, and we were, well, a bit nervous at the last block we'd been walking through. It was also hard to spot the street names sometimes. Also, crossing Spadina, it seemed like Front Street would curve southward or something. So we turned up Spadina, hoping that at least we'd spot King Street. And we did, after a couple of blocks. We even saw our hotel...which we had overshot by a block or two. So at least we wouldn't have to pass through the darkened area of Front & Spadina.

By the time we got back to our room our feet were tired. Little did they know it was only the beginning.

Surging upward toward the top spot on the countdown:

298. Dave Stewart & The Spiritual Cowboys: R.U. Satisfied, from Dave Stewart & The Spiritual Cowboys

The best song to come out of Dave Stewart's uneven "Spiritual Cowboys" album. It has a bit of a sense of menace to it, from the bassline ostinato during the verses, and Dave Stewart's lyrics and singing aren't embarrassing, though I wouldn't say they were profound.

297. REM: Drive, from Automatic For The People

I always think of the video for this song, with its extended stage-dives and flashing spotlights. The song itself is fairly abstract, but the guitar and bass carry it along quite well, with Michael Stipe's vocals furthering the mood. Exquisite.

And a great whirling and a bashing of keys arose

2003-09-06T22:43:00.000-06:00

I Dim The Lights And Think About You

Hey, long time no blog. Of course.

I admit that skipping an entire month was extreme even for me, so let me just say that I decided to celebrate, in an odd fashion, the second anniversary of my blog(on August 31st)by not posting at all in the month of August. I came to this decision on about...oh, August 26th. I mean, I was going to head to Worldcon in a couple of days, so I thought, why bother?

I'm curious to see whether I will have an empty "August 2003" entry in my archive list or not, too, but that's just lagniappe.

I really do want to do some posts on Worldcon(which was last weekend--we were in Toronto from Thursday through to Monday), while it's still fresh in my mind, but first I want to get caught up on what I've been reading for the past month-plus...

When last I wrote, I was reading Alien Embassy by Ian Watson. It was interesting, if a bit bizarre, and it takes some time before we find out what is really going on. It hasn't aged well, I'd have to say.

The Ted Chiang story collection, Stories of Your Life And Others, was wonderful. Every story in the book was as good as "Understand", the one that first turned me on to the guy. I highly recommend it to everybody who can read English(and anyone else who can read it in translation, if the translation's any good).

After that I went on to Steven Brust's The Paths of The Dead. This is the third book in his "Phoenix Guards" series, and also the first book in the "Viscount of Adrilankha" series. "VoA" is a subseries within "PG", the same way that its model, "The Viscount of Bragelonne", was a subseries within Alexandre Dumas's "Musketeers" books. The last part of "Bragelonne" is famous as "The Man In The Iron Mask"; I often wonder why nobody ever talks about the rest of it. Not even Twenty Years After, the direct sequel to The Three Musketeers. Must be something about that iron mask.

Whether Brust will hold to a strict allegory, I don't know. This book does a lot of important stuff that is hearkened back to in the Vlad Taltos books, like restoring the Phoenix Heir, establishing some crucial history of Morrolan(the titular Viscount, if I recall correctly), and tons of other stuff. It is an all-around fun read, though of course it makes more sense if you have at least read the previous two "Phoenix Guards" books, and ideally you'd have read all the Vlad Taltos books as well, but since they come afterwards they're not necessary. The "Paths of The Dead" sequence itself is pretty cool, though it comes quite late in the book.

Then I had the urge to read Look To Windward by Iain M. Banks. I haven't read much Banks--The Wasp Factory, one of his mainstream books that was delightfully twisted, and one of his SF books set in the "Culture" universe, Consider Phlebas. Phlebas was perhaps uneven, but it had some amazing scenes, and a climactic conflict sequence that I still think back on with delight. I was given to understand that not only was Look To Windward also a "Culture" book, but that it was directly related, in some way, to Phlebas, because both titles come from the same stanza of T.S. Eliot.

If so, I was unable to discern it. Phlebas takes place almost entirely outside the Culture, a fairly hedonistic civilization living off the high technology of its day. Windward is mostly inside it, though the main plot comes from conflict between the Culture and one of the civilizations it meddled in. It is very slow-moving, and has nowhere near as good scenes as Phlebas. Well, maybe the human in chimp-form diving through a gigantic air bubble for his fallen stylus was pretty cool... Maybe I need to read some of the intervening Culture books--The Use of Weapons, The Player of Games, etc. But I was a bit disappointed in this one.

By then I decided it was time to move forward in Tad Williams's "Otherland" series. The first book, City of Golden Shadow, I read a few years ago, and it was okay, but a bit confusing and slow. The second book, River of Blue Fire, was still pretty slow, introducing a number of characters whose relevance seemed questionable, but by the end things were moving a bit faster. So I decided to read the third book, Mountain of Black Glass. That one had such an exciting whiz-bang ending that I decided to go straight on to the final volume, Sea of Silver Light, which I finished in Toronto.

"Otherland" is SF, but almost all of it takes place in a massive virtual-reality setting whose underpinnings are not truly explained until the very end. We follow a group of characters from a number of sources, who of course get to do heroic things by the end. Most of the characters introduced in the second book do have crucial importance to the climax, and by the end I don't begrudge the time spent on them. Sometimes I think that the characters spent too much time complaining about not being able to figure out what was going on, pointing out the glaring inconsistencies in the theories they tried to come up with to explain what was happening to them. By the end, the explanation was pretty outlandish, and basically so far from what we could have figured out from reading it that the few truly knowledgeable characters have to spent a large chunk of time explaining it. I imagine that Mr. Williams knew what was behind everything from the start, though most of it seems to have been rigged so that things would work the way he wanted them to. It was fitfully entertaining, but in the end it seemed mind-numbingly improbable.

By then I had a copy of Open Space, the anthology my story "The New Paranoia Album" was published in. I had heard some of the authors read from their stories at Worldcon, and I actually started reading the book at one of our mass signings. I finished it on the plane trip home. It was pretty good, though I'd have to say that I don't know if I would have picked all the stories that Claude Lalumière, the editor, did. (It'd be fun to edit my own anthology, or magazine, someday, if someone else would do the hard work of actually publishing it.)

When I got home, I pulled out the book Invoking Darkness, third in the "Passing of the Techno-Mages" series. Babylon 5 is the only tie-in fiction I read these days. Jeanne Cavelos's series is nowhere near as good as Peter David's "Centauri" series, or J. Gregory Keyes's "Psi Corps" series, but not too bad. A large chunk of this book, though, comes off as a bit forced when it intersects actual Babylon 5 episodes, and has to match the script while having many more things go on in the background. I can't even remember which bits actually were in real episodes. I also wonder if J. Michael Straczynski had all this stuff figured out when he was writing Season 3 of B5, when much of it might have only come to light during "Crusade". Galen the techno-mage from that series is the main character of these books, you see, and the main climax of this book takes place on Z'ha'dum at the end of Season 3 when Sheridan goes there to face the Shadow. But it's nice to be able to tie off yet another series.

I've spent years trying to relax my reading habits, and I think I've finally succeeded. I used to read books in strict chronological order, then I shifted some up into a "priority" queue, and then I created a number of slots which I read in rotation. Most recently, I've had a system of slots, where one or more books from each slot were on my shelf at any given time, plus some others I felt like reading, and I alternated between reading whatever I wanted in one month and reading the slots I was furthest behind on in the next month.

But with all the Hugo and Aurora reading I've been doing in the last few months, it's all fallen by the wayside, and I find myself in the position of reading more or less what I feel like. Case in point--after the Techno-Mage book, I picked up Lois McMaster Bujold's Komarr. Since Mirror Dance, I've gotten increasingly hooked on Bujold, and the last time I read her, I read Cetaganda and Memory right in a row. Nicole, who's even more into Bujold than I am, has told me more or less what happens in each book.

There's a SF plot in each book, but it's increasingly becoming a backseat to the interpersonal relationships. Komarr, for instance, had a plot involving high-tech sabotage and terrorist plots, but what we were really interested in was Ekaterina Vorsoisson, a newly introduced character who shared POV with Miles Vorkosigan(our hero). Miles has had trouble with his love life for several books now, and I imagine even if I hadn't gotten some spoilers from Nicole, I would've realized quickly that she and Miles had some kind of shared destiny. It was also clear that this would not be resolved in Komarr.

So after I finished that, I went right into the next book, A Civil Campaign. I don't even know if this one has a big SF plot, though there are some signs. The major plot, the campaign of the title, seems to be Miles's campaign to win the hand of Ekaterina, despite her horrible first marriage and recent widowing. But it is enriched by multiple viewpoints--not only Miles and Ekaterina, but also Miles's clone-brother Mark, who is a much edgier character; Mark's girlfriend Kareen Koudelka; Miles's feckless cousin Ivan Vorpatril; and possibly others still to come. There are so many plot elements active right now, it's hard to tell--one of them could push to the forefront. "Intrigue" is the term, I guess. But I know there is a certain amount of happily-ever-after due.

I also just finished going through The Great Hunt, second volume in Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, for my concordance. I might hold off on going straight into The Dragon Reborn. It is fun to reread them, but I'm also chafing at the slow pace. Most of the good stuff starts in Book Four, The Shadow Rising, and let's face it, we're up to ten books now. Of course, I may be finished it before Book Eleven comes out. There are those prequels due next year, though...just to complicate matters.

Back to the ever-faithful countdown entry, waiting patiently for its eventual conclusion:

300. Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes, from Scoop

I like this version much better than the Who version, but then in general I seem to like Pete Townshend better than The Who. Maybe Daltrey's vocals are better suited to the character in the song, who seems to be stuck somewhere between autism and sociopathy, but somehow I like the sparer guitar sound on the Townshend version.

299. Side By Side By Sondheim: Losing My Mind, from Side By Side By Sondheim

This song is from a revue of songs from Stephen Sondheim musicals. At the close of the show, each of the three singers does one solo number, and this is one of those. I don't know the dramatic context, but it seems fairly self-contained, with a housewife wrestling with a passion that doesn't mesh with her domestic life. As a result, it is carried almost entirely by the force of the singer's vocals(I can't remember her name right now, unfortunately--Julie something?), and is nearly transcendent in the way such a song can be.

Can you help me at the center of the three bodies.

2003-07-31T23:04:00.000-06:00

There's A City In My Mind

The dilation thing last Saturday went okay. Not too bad at all, really.

I went in to the optometrist as part of our normal Saturday morning mall trip. I got the air-puff glaucoma test again(even though I'd just had it a week earlier--I guess they like to be thorough), and then the optometrist gave me some eyedrops. They stung quite badly, but he said it would be the worst part of the whole process.

Then I went back out for twenty minutes, browsing in the bookstore, though after ten minutes I found that I couldn't read the back cover blurbs anymore. My eyes felt distinctly weird, too, sort of stretched.

After I went back to the optometrist's, he sat me down and shone bright light into my eyes for a few minutes. He shone and looked in each eye from every possible angle, asking to me to look in various directions, shining the light in, sometimes even opening my eyelids wider.

The coolest thing about that process was that sometimes, if the light was shining from the right angle, I could actually see the blood vessels and such on the back of my eye. When I asked the optometrist about it later, he said that I was actually seeing the shadows of them. It didn't take that long, and then I was done. Oh, I had to do the air-puff test again, but after what I'd just been through, holding my eyes open for that was a breeze. My eyes were still dilated, though.

I had been sure to bring in the clip-on sunglasses from the car, and I put them on before I went outside. Without the ability to narrow my pupils in the bright light, I could have been badly dazzled. As it was, I kept my eyes closed for a while in the car--Nicole driving, of course.

We actually went down to Beaumont for a while, since Nicole's cousin Michelle was in town for a wedding on the weekend, and she had stopped by with her father to see Nicole's parents. They only stayed for about half an hour after we got there, but it was nice to see them anyway. Michelle is one of my favourites of Nicole's cousins, but she lives in southern California these days. We don't get down there too often, but she comes up for family weddings and things...though most of those should be done for a while, on Nicole's side, at least.

I looked at my eyes in the bathroom mirror when we got there, and sure enough, the irises were almost invisible. I could mostly see okay, as long as I didn't try to focus on anything small, or look at anything brightly lit.

We stayed there for lunch after Michelle and her dad left, and then went home. I had been intending to do dishes while my eyes recovered, but somehow that didn't happen. Instead, I had a nap. Well, it had been my morning to sleep in, but I ended up not getting back to sleep after Nicole got the kids up, and I imagine all the messing around with my eyes must have made me tired, too. After I got up, I didn't feel like doing them either. But my eyes were pretty much recovered by that point--at least, I could read again.

I think the customized Blogspot ads these days are hysterical. Take a look. Because I just talked about my eye appointment, they're probably all about sunglasses and contact lenses and stuff. When I did my entry about the thistles, it was all on lawn care equipment. That's funny. Somebody is going and figuring out keywords to determine when certain ads come up.

This really calls for an experiment, on someone else's blog...

I think we have locusts in town. Not quite sure, because I didn't take a good look at them, but it could be.

I hate insects. With the possible exceptions of harmless- or even cute-looking ones, like ladybugs and aphids, and possibly dragonflies. And my mom would be mad at me if I didn't exclude bees. But the rest of them--and most of the rest of invertebrates, when it comes down to it--give me the willies.

I am totally squeamish around them. I can step on ants, that's no problem, but anything larger than that, I can't make myself do it. If I think it will make a noise, or I will feel it, or even if it leaves a visible carcass behind, I can't do it. I certainly can't touch the things(though I have been known to let ladybugs crawl on my fingers). Nicole, at least, could pick up a huge beetle with a kleenex and squish it. No way I'd even get near it. I'm glad that I live someplace above the cockroach line.

I remember when I was a kid we had a bunch of tent caterpillars in Alberta. They would be crawling around on the grass, on the sidewalk, on the trees, on the outside of your house. There were always tales of them falling into people's hair. I certainly remember getting grossed out when I ran them over with my bike, which was sometimes hard to avoid.

After it rains, I always have to step carefully to try to avoid stepping on earthworms, because that would gross me out, too. I'm sure I must look insane, studying the ground, hopping delicately from spot to spot. Sometimes I step to avoid something that turns out to be just a stick, but better safe than sorry.

Spiders are mostly fine, though. The bigger ones I am still a little squeamish around, but let's face it, they eat insects, and as long as they keep out of sight when they do so, that's fine with me. I read Charlotte's Web many times as a child, so I know that spiders are our friends. I hate walking into spiderwebs in the woods, though(possibly because of all the dead bugs that are probably on them), which is one reason I don't go walking in the woods.

Anyway, the locusts. I saw one outside of work last week sometime. Like a grasshopper, but bigger, and more of a drab yellow-brown than green.

Actually, now that I check into it, I see that they're not really locusts, because locusts apparently refer to the ones that actually swarm and change their eating habits or something. The picture on this site is probably close to what I saw. Here's another article, from last year, about the lack of locusts in Western Canada. So maybe they are grasshoppers after all, just not bright green ones like I expected. I am, obviously, not an entomologist, nor do I have the slightest urge to become one.

But I haven't been seeing them on grass. The one was on the sidewalk. And somehow, one of them got into our car. I'm forgetting how, now, but it got in there. I would forget about it for an entire day, and then when I got home from work and got out of the car, I'd see it still clinging to the inside of the window of one of the back doors, just looking big and insectile and mindless. I finally got it out of there by opening the door and knocking it off with the largest wieldy-looking implement in our carport, the folding plastic snow shovel. I assume it hopped/scuttled off somewhere, and I haven't seen it since. But it gave me retrospective creeps, that it could have jumped down on me while I was driving, or on Luke, if we'd put him in there with it.

I haven't seen any in a few days, but I'm still not quite relaxed. I'm wondering whether the one window in the basement is sealed enough, if Simon is going to let some into the house when he forgets to close the patio screen door, and things like that. I hate insects.

I finished reading Dulcinea. It was okay, in the sense that there were both really good bits and winceworthy bad bits. For instance, in the pre-gunpowderish magic-using fantasy world, the first-person narrator used "terrorist", "theremin"(as a verb, no less), and "microphone"! Bad Shalanna. And it took me a long time to get into it, because Dulcinea, her father, and the "apprentice" Raz were all acting annoyingly. Dulcinea herself was the one who showed the most improvement, perhaps because she's still a teenager. But she flip-flopped between being surprisingly, almost implausibly, competent, and acting helpless.

It gets a little bit Harry-Potterish at the end(or perhaps more Dragonsingerish)with the introduction of a college of majick, but I gather more of that may feature in the next book, Dulcinea's Dragon. Or not--from the sample chapter included at the end, she may leave the school before we see much of it. Anyway, I may be sufficiently interested to check it out, as long as I don't actually have to buy it in trade paperback(or hardcover). This is something I'd be willing to buy used, or for mass-market prices. Not much chance from this publisher, though.

I also(as I might have mentioned elsewhere, possibly on LiveJournal)read Eric Raymond's excellent The Cathedral And The Bazaar. It's a book about open source, which is a hot topic today, especially in the world of writing web applications with Java, where most of the tools are open source. But Linux is, of course, an early example, and so is Apache. Netscape/Mozilla(all but orphaned by AOL)is more recent, and in fact was apparently spurred by Raymond's title article. I recommend it to people who are interested in computers and stuff.*

I have started Ian Watson's Alien Embassy. It's interesting, reading this book(from 1977)so shortly after Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice And Salt, because Robinson's book makes extensive reference to "the bardo", the afterlife place(from Tibetan lore, apparently)where souls are judged before returning to life. It also turns up in Alien Embassy, though not in the same sense. That is, it's an organization whose acronymized name is a reference to the mythical one.

Watson is going by the premise that western science basically collapsed after first contact was made with aliens...by a woman in a tantric sex ritual. Acupuncture, chakras, Kirlian auras, and Eastern philosophy have dominated, concentration of humanity in cities is being reversed, and a young African girl is about to start getting trained as one of these tantric travellers. Only in the 70's could one get away with this being science fiction.*

We bought a bunch of books at "Book Traders", a nearby second-hand bookstore, but few of them are ones I will be reading anytime soon. I am more likely to read one of the books that came in today in an amazon.com shipment--Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life And Others. I loved his story "Understand" when I read it a few years ago, and have been waiting for more from him. This is a collection of multiple award-winning stories, including "Understand", and I bought it in trade paperback, something I rarely do. I am looking forward to it. Chiang is actually high on the list of authors I would like to meet at Worldcon...and so I should try to read his book first, right?

I'm also reading Drew Carey's Dirty Jokes And Beer as lighter fare, something I picked up from the library booksale table last week. It's okay so far, if not always consistently funny. But then, he isn't always trying to be funny, and he seems to be okay at serious, too. I've never watched his show, apart from the April Fool's(?) episode which included a Sims-style scene, though I did get accustomed to him on "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"

Yesterday, while they were having the big concert in Toronto to promote tourism and convince people that SARS is really not a threat anymore(which it isn't, from everything I've heard from the people who live there), I ended up listening to the Rolling Stones' "Forty Licks", which I suppose is almost like being at the concert. It is an impressive body of work, though I would almost have to favour the first disc, of work before 1969, to the second. "Satisfaction" has really grown on me over the last few years, and "Mother's Little Helper" was disturbingly familiar. Some of the other songs I had actually only ever heard(that I recall)as part of Weird Al Yankovic's "Hot Rocks Polka".*

Today, I listened to the soundtrack of "Once More With Feeling", that musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I have to say, that while the music itself did nothing for me, and I am not impressed with Sarah Michelle Gellar's singing ability, it fills me with an increased desire to actually watch the show. Enough so that I am seriously considering getting a DVD player this weekend, so that we can either rent or borrow the first season's episodes. If we rent them, we'd have to try to watch the whole season in a week, which sounds impossible...but if we borrow them, then we have to find someone we know who has them, and most of those people are Cult of Pain members from Calgary, who won't be coming up until the meeting on August 9th(or from Singapore, who won't be here for the foreseeable future)...and we won't even be at the meeting, because of the Prairie Heraldry Society barbecue which I forgot about.

I've been looking at character guides and episode guides, just trying to glean some basic background information, even though I know I probably shouldn't. I've already picked up a fair bit, though, so it doesn't bother me that much.

I also listened to the "Daredevil" soundtrack, but I'd have to say that the only song I liked was that Evanescence one. When did movie soundtracks start to be filled with sludge-rock? I remember when they were all alt-rock stuff, like "Empire Records" and stuff. Maybe it's just the superhero movies, because "Spider-Man" was just as bad. Is this what the teenagers are really all listening to these days? Kids. But I will have to check out Evanescence.

Long weekend coming up, and I almost forgot about it! It's the Heritage Day weekend here in Alberta; it's not a national holiday, but most provinces have some holiday or other that day. There's probably one in the U.S., too, but I don't remember. Columbus Day or something.

It's been kind of hot around here for a few days--it was up to 32°C today. Almost as bad as last summer...except that last summer there was no respite. This summer, we do get rain every once in a while, and even some cloudy and cool days.

I have definitely gotten completely inverted from the majority with respect to my tastes in weather. Anytime the radio announcers say, "It'll be a beautiful weekend! Sunny, with highs of 29 on Saturday...", it just makes me wince. I'd much rather hear about clouds and rain. I don't like sunny weather, that's all there is to it. It's too hot and it's too bright. I'll sit down in the basement with my fluorescent lights and my computer and avoid it, if it's all the same to you. The rest of you walk around outside and get skin cancer if you want to.

Time to count it down, boyo:

302. Savage Progress: My Soul Unwraps Tonight, from Celebration

One of the best titles in my list, I have to say. This may have been the only song from this album ever to get a video release, and it may not be the best on the album, but it is pretty damn good. African rhythms, deep male vocal harmonies contrasting with the female lead.

301. Talking Heads: Road To Nowhere, from Little Creatures

This is the song that got me into the Talking Heads. To be sure, I hadn't really listened to them before, though I had seen my brother's vaguely scary "Stop Making Sense" single lying around. It still has killer harmonies, a propulsive rhythm section, and wonderful lyrics. Totally singalongable, too.

Please eat up quickly once the package is opened by you. --AjD

2003-07-24T22:29:00.000-06:00

Now It Cuts Too Close

I did indeed get my LiveJournal set up, and you can look at it here, or up on the sidebar over there. So far, so good with the short entries. I will be trying to point back here from there, but not vice versa(except for a specific topic), since I hope to be updating there more frequently than here.

I spent a while last night filling in my "Interests" list, which was kind of fun. I hope to do a series of short posts over there on the interests on the list, just because I think it would be interesting. I haven't filled in my Friends list as much; I put in half a dozen talk.bizarre people, and then came across JT Traub, who was the only other person to put "Lorenai" as an interest. That's pretty much it so far.

I went to the optometrist last Saturday. No special reason, just a checkup. Nicole and Simon went a few days earlier. It was Simon's first eye doctor visit. Apparently at that age they tend to give you pictures to look at rather than letters, but from what Nicole said the pictures were not ones that Simon would necessarily recognize, like older-style phones. Simon knows all his letters, so he could have done that, and next time they probably will. He will almost certainly need glasses, but then we expected that. Neither of his parents is particularly keen-eyed. And he does seem to want to stand awfully close to the TV when he watches it.

My vision was fine, for the most part. My left eye is stronger than my right, of course, but that's to be expected, since I'm mostly right-handed. My glasses prescription hasn't changed since last time, and apparently I might actually be 20/15 with them on.

I have to go back this Saturday, though.

My mother has glaucoma, you see. She's getting treatment for it, but she's got it, and so I have to get checked for it. And not just with those puff-of-air tests they do, either. I still pass those no problem, unpleasant as they are.

No, I have to get my eyes dilated so they can take a good look at my nerves and blood vessels, to see if there's even the glimmerings of a problem now, and if not to see what the current state is so they have something to measure it against later.

I've never had my eyes dilated, and in fact I hadn't even heard of the procedure before that South Park episode with the succubus and the Loch Ness Monster. I go in Saturday morning, they put in some drops, my eyes dilate, and then they look at them. After that, 4-6 hours later, it wears off.

While my eyes are dilated, I will have trouble doing things like reading or looking at a computer screen. I guess I'll be doing dishes for some of that time, so it won't matter too much. I'll probably have to bring sunglasses so that I don't get blinded when I go outside. Or maybe it will be cloudy. (It's gone back and forth this summer, an immense improvement on the unrelenting heat of last summer.)

It's a little bit scary, but hopefully it will turn out okay. I'll keep you posted on the experience.

I finished reading both Andy Nebula and The Salmon of Doubt. The latter I already posted about on my LiveJournal. The former was a pretty good read; for a YA book, it had some pretty frank talk about drugs in it. Drugs as evil things that can hijack one's life, of course, nothing all that ambiguous about it, but then these drugs had pretty unambiguous effects. An interesting take on the whole "manufactured band" phenomenon, too.

Now I've started reading Shalanna Collins's Dulcinea. I remember Shalanna from the Fidonet Writing Echo some years ago--probably almost a decade, by now. I read that one a lot, though a lot of my posts didn't get through for whatever reason(Fidonet not being the 100% greatest transport medium), so I guess I was mostly a lurker. She'd told a story of screwing up her first signing with an agent, and I'm glad to see that she has recovered from that one. Not very far into the book, which is a YA fantasy with the titular female protagonist(though with the prosaic last name "Brown").

I want to try to fit in Ian Watson's Alien Embassy before the end of the month. It's currently in the position of being probably the book I have had the longest without having read, and I like to keep that position moving ever-so-slowly forward, at the rate of one a month if possible. I was very impressed by his short story "Windows" in Asimov's some years ago, and I started buying his books. I don't think I've read any of his novels yet, though...so this should be interesting.

I picked up a few CDs recently, too, some new at A&B Sound, and some cheap at the library booksale table.

The new ones were:

Weird Al Yankovic:Poodle Hat. As often, I stumbled across this one without being aware that he had a new album out, though I'd heard about his parodying the Eminem song(which I haven't even heard). All in all, a decent contribution to his oeuvre.

Neil Young:Are You Passionate?. I keep hearing bad things about this album, but then, the first Neil Young album I bought was the lambasted "Landing On Water", so that's par for the course. I think the songs on this album work quite well, and hope he does more albums with Booker T & the MG's.

Cake:Prolonging The Magic. Not altogether that new, I've actually been wanting this one for a while, but I just hadn't gotten around to picking it up. I am glad I did.

Hooverphonic:The Magnificent Tree. Very glad to have this one, too! It is an exquisite album.

The The:NakedSelf. Not quite as good as I remember on my last listen, but I'm still happy to have it.

From the booksale, I got:

Philip Glass:1000 Airplanes On The Roof. Well, I didn't care for it that much, but for a buck I was willing to spring for it. It's not like it was bad, more that it didn't make an impression.

Goldie:Saturnzreturn. I remember being quite impressed with the hour-long opening track, "Mother", when I first listened to this one some time ago. The rest of the album(most of which is, of course, on the second disc)is quite listenable electronica.

Sophie Zelmani. Another one that never really made it onto my wishlist, but there was one quite striking song on it, "You And Him(String Version)"(though I'm not sure where any alternative versions of it may be, since there aren't any on the album), about a woman talking to a homeless man and trying to overcome her first impressions of him. The rest of the album hasn't made much impression yet, but that song was worth a buck.

Rollins Band:Weight. I'm not sure about this one, since mostly it's too heavy for me, but "Liar" was a fairly approachable song, so I might keep it around for a while.

I am still borrowing CDs and listening to them, but I just can't keep up with them. Maybe I'll try commenting on them realtime on LiveJournal or something.

Time to continue counting down my 750 favourite songs:

304. Peter Gabriel: Kiss of Life, from Security

It's mostly the intense and propulsive drums that I like from this song, since I haven't made much headway with figuring out the lyrics yet. It's more fun to pound the steering wheel to than to sing along in the car with, so far.

303. 'Til Tuesday: Winning The War, from Voices Carry

I make no bones about liking 'Til Tuesday better than Aimee Mann's later solo work. This song was one of my favourites from their first album since I bought it(though the first two singles were strong enough to get me to do so). Maybe it's the harmony on the chorus, or the interweaving vocal lines in the coda, always one of my favourite techniques.

The pills that I took, they made my fingers disappear --David Bowie, "Time Will Crawl"

2003-07-21T22:35:00.000-06:00

The Strong Man Suddenly Became Weak

A few days ago I looking at a headline on MSN.ca, and I realized it could be read a few different ways. The headline is "Police find body searching for arms expert". Now, not only can you parse that as "Body searching for arms expert is found by police", but if you conveniently omit the word "expert"(which appears on the next line in my browser), then it becomes the even better "Police find body searching for arms", which is a great mental image. Or it could even be "Police find body searching for arms to be expert".

Last week, I was listening to Rupert Hine's "The Wildest Wish To Fly", and happened to take a good look at the cover art. Like most of my musical collection from the 80's, I have it on cassette tape, so it's hard to make out. It basically consists of a circle with a picture of a plane in it, and writing around the outside. The top part of the writing says, "The Wildest Wish To Fly", which of course makes sense. But I'd never looked at the bottom part of the writing before, which apparently says: "Does the power command the right". This is not a line from the title song, or from anywhere on the album, as far as I know. A Google search on the phrase as a whole turn up nothing. It's something I can see Hine writing, though, especially given his next album with the Thinkman project. But I'd never gone to the trouble of reading those words before.

Our new office doesn't have its own washrooms; instead, we share them with everybody else on the floor. The men's washroom doesn't have much of a fan in it to dissipate fecal odours, but it does have an air freshener, which I assume is what is in that plastic container mounted at the top of the stall. Until a few days ago it was a pleasant, mild cherry scent. Now, though, it's a rank "pine" scent. "Pine" like a pile of fresh pine needles that have all been broken in the middle and then left sitting half-submerged in stagnant water. It's repugnant, as well as pungent. I feel like writing a complaint on a sticky note and putting it on the plastic container. It doesn't seem worth pursuing a more formal complaint, but it might get some results.

For as long as I can remember, I have been a proponent of even usage. If I have four water glasses, then I will try to use them all equally, which usually means in a last-in-last-out queue. I am still vaguely suspicious of, say, disk allocation algorithms that use a stack, because, well, don't the memory locations frequently popped off the top of the stack get used more often? And isn't that bad for them? I know nothing about how hard drives degenerate through usage, so this is mostly baseless.

A few years ago there was a proposal to switch the "slow traffic" lane on four-lane highways in Alberta. Since the largest vehicles, which cause the most wear on the road, tend to be slow ones, they were always wearing out the right-hand lane faster than the left one, and so the highway would need to be repaired when really only half of it had been worn down. It made sense to me that if you switched every year or something, that the wear would be spread more evenly, and this would be a good thing. But I guess more people thought that it would be too hard to have to remember which the slow lane was, or, worse, that the slow drivers(like those of us who go the speed limit)would end up in both lanes, rendering the speeders unable to go as fast as they craved. (Yes, I know that there are genuinely slow vehicles out there, but as someone who drives the speed limit, I'd have to say there are more faster than me than slower.)

And I have come to learn that even usage is not always desirable. It was brought home to me in the bathroom in our old office. There were two toilet paper rolls, and I would always use the one which had the most paper on it. Until they were both close to empty, and I realized what would happen if they both ran out before they were replaced. Since then, I've been conscientious about using the less full roll every time.

The shared bathroom we use in our new office has three rolls, two on the actual racks and one sitting around loose. The loose one seems to get used more often, which seems nonsensical to me, but then it often sits on top of the other rolls, which makes it difficult to use them. I tend to move it to the top of the tank, so it can serve its correct role as a spare. The racks also have elliptical rollers instead of round ones, which I find quite strange. Do they have some kind of advantage I'm not aware of? More ergonomic? Harder to steal? In our house, Simon often runs off with the rollers, and more often than not the toilet paper just sits on the counter.

But back to even usage. Of socks, this time. If I buy a new package of six pairs of socks, and then try even usage, then they tend to wear out around the same time. It's hard to do pure even usage, because the socks are indistinguishable, for the most part. And then, if I buy another six pairs, I will tend to use the new ones in preference to the old ones, until one day I found that the old ones are less worn than the new ones...

So it's still possibly not the best policy in all situations. It works well with food, or at least the queueing model, so you always use the oldest milk carton until it's empty, though pouring equal amounts from each carton is just plain silly. (So would be wearing each pair of socks for one-sixth of a day.)

Recently we finally got around to seeing "Star Trek: Nemesis". We missed it in the first-run theatres, we missed it in the discount theatres, but we finally found it on video. It was okay, but I guess I always have the same problem with Star Trek: TNG movies. They are too much like the TV show. The special effects are better, but the plots are basically the same. They're like the two-hour season finales, except without necessarily having an arbitrary cliffhanger in the middle.

The original Star Trek movies were at least different from the series that spawned them, because of the gap in time in between. Special effects had developed, budgets increased, and I imagine that some of the plots got better, too.

Watching Nemesis also inspired me to compose a couple more entries to The Evil Overlord List. These may constitute spoilers, so read at your own risk:

A. If I make an exact duplicate of a hero, then I will assume that any time it is out of my sight it could conceivably have been switched with the original hero, and act accordingly.

B. My dungeons will not be connected with the rest of my headquarters through a complex maze of passages. There will be one simple, well-lit corridor(devoid of alcoves, as another rule states), so that there is no chance that escaped prisoners will be able to sneak past me while I am going to interrogate them.

Of course, one of the main points of the movie was that the bad guy was not infallible, far from it. But still, I had to shake my head when I was watching it.

I'm still fiddling around with Marvel Superheroes stuff. I found an interesting web site, at heroplay.com, which had some nifty utilities for MSH, including character generators, character sheets, and the like. I haven't tried them all out yet, but the MSH Character Generator looks like it might be a bit of a timesaver.

They had a PDF copy there of the "Ultimate Powers Book". I think that Jeremy probably had this one--at least I think I'd seen it before--but I'd forgotten about it. It was an attempt codify every single possible power that anyone has ever had in any comic book, plus anything else that seems like a natural interpolation. So it suffers from serious kitchen sink-itis, but I was getting a little bored with the relatively tiny list in the MSH book, so I guess I'll try it.

One of my favourite powers listed in there was "Troubleseeker", which basically means that every few days you are automatically teleported into some situation where your help is needed. You can't leave the area without teleporting back(not even if someone else is carrying you!). Sort of like the protagonist in Dean Koontz's excellent Cold Fire. Or, if you add in Time Travel and Dimensional Travel, and a British police box, you get The Doctor... Or maybe even "Quantum Leap".

I think I've come up with a tentative plan about what to do with my superheroes. At the moment I've mostly just generated the cluster of mutants in the Calgary area; I've been converting their powers to the UPB equivalents, which is not always easy, and been coming up with little histories for them. But what do a group of heroes need? They need a reason to come together, and a reason to stay together. They need a place to stay, and ideally they need some equipment.

I kept toying with the idea of making of the mutants bad guys, but I haven't managed it yet. Somehow the bad-guy origins are just not occurring to me. So I thought, I need a whole different class of people to be the bad guys. How about the good old alien invasion? The slow, infiltrative kind.

I had a kooky idea for someone who could be a mentor, and I swear it wasn't entirely inspired by the Royal Canadian Air Farce. See, I remembered how Alpha Flight was sponsored by the government, and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau turned up in reference to them at least once. That made me instantly think of another former Prime Minister who is currently more or less based in Calgary--Joe Clark. Now Joe Clark was Prime Minister for less than a year, because of the quaint tradition of the "non-confidence vote" that we inherited from British politics. It's one of the first political events I actually remember, in fact, his getting voted out of office. He returned to politics briefly a few years ago, and won a seat for the Progressive Conservative party in Calgary.

So he'd be perfect! Say that when he was Prime Minister, he was contacted by a member of this alien species, who opposed the conquest of Earth, warning him about it. Maybe he kept it to himself, maybe it's really why he was voted out of office. Anyway, he keeps in contact with the aliens, and eventually manages to broker a deal where the government(which has been dominated by the Liberal Party for years)clandestinely sponsors groups of superheroes. The Air Farce often lampooned him as the goofy "Joe Clark, International Agent", or called him "Joe Clark, the Dan Quayle of Canada". But hey, maybe he was an international agent!*

I was also thinking that this might be first generation of mutants, and maybe the dissident aliens also engineered that somehow, by introducing mutagenic particles or chemicals or radiation or whatever into the atmosphere. Maybe the dissidents are mutants themselves, second-class citizens of this other race. I haven't worked that part out yet.

Maybe this will turn into my NaNoWriMo novel this year. Superheroes in Calgary.

Of course, there will likely be tons more mutants in the rest of the world, too, if I keep to my original premise of one in every million or so people being a mutant. But I could change that(6000 mutants is a lot to keep track of, quite frankly), or downplay it. Or it could even just be Canada that has mutants, for whatever reason. I kind of like that idea.

Anyways, I'm still having fun with the idea, so I'm running with it.

I finished Driving Force, which was a perfectly good but not exceptionally brilliant work from Dick Francis. Now I'm mostly frantically trying to finish the Rebecca Blood book because it's due back at the library tomorrow...but reading it makes me want to blog, so I'm going back and forth.

I'm also reading Douglas Adams's The Salmon of Doubt. I elected to treat it as a nonfiction book, despite the novel fragment at the end--the fiction book I'm really reading right now is Ed Willett's YA-SF Andy Nebula, Interstellar Rock Star. (Hmmm...apparently Ed, an SF Canada member, is quoting me reviewing Soulworm. I remember reading that one, but I don't remember when I posted the comment he quoted. It sounds like me, though...)

Anyway, The Salmon of Doubt is incredibly engaging, and makes one realize how superficially one could judge Douglas Adams based solely on his Hitchhiker's Guide books, even adding Dirk Gently. I feel his loss more keenly on reading this book than I did when it actually happened. Dammit.

I still have to get around to reading as many of the Hugo/Aurora eligible short stories, which are probably online somewhere to facilitate being voted on. The voting deadline is the end of the month, I think, which is only a little over a week away...

Continuing on with the counting down:

306. Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper: Circus Mystery, from Root Hog Or Die

This is one of those rare Skid songs, and probably his best. With atmospheric music, Skid lovingly recounts various symptoms of distress in the circus community, making many bad puns along the way. What is the circus mystery? He never says.

305. OMD: Crush, from Crush

This album is so much more than the two singles, "So In Love" and "Secret". The title track features Andy McCluskey's huskily melancholy vocals in constrat a number of repeating patterns of vocal samples, with lyrics that complain of rain and allude to heartbreak.

'I want you to accompany me on the safari.' 'I've never played one in my life!' --Seagoon & Bloodnok, "The Goon Show"

2003-07-17T23:15:00.000-06:00

You Were Born, And So You're Free

It was my birthday on Monday. My age? Well, let's just say that I'm into six bits now, and leave it at that.

Pretty low key. I didn't get that many presents, but I didn't solicit them from that many people.

Nicole got me an X-Men book I'd been drooling over in the bookstore the week before. X-Men: The Ultimate Guide or something, a recent edition with passing references to the second movie. I was curious to find out what they had done with the series(singular or plural)after I stopped reading fifteen years ago. But more on that below.

We went out to a movie, "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". It was either that one, T3, or "Pirates of The Caribbean". We missed the other two, so LXG it was.

It wasn't too bad. I was neither completely at sea among the numerous literary references, nor puristically outraged at the liberties they took with the source material and characters. Nautilus seemed to do some pretty improbable things, like regularly going into water much too shallow for it, but whatever. It managed some poignancy to it, and the plot twists were neither too obvious nor too contrived.

I've been toying with the idea of going to LiveJournal, actually. I've been reading Rebecca Blood's book on blogging, and I think that I've gotten myself into a rut blogwise. I can't do short entries anymore. They have to be long. So I don't get anything really spontaneous.

I've got a system, you see. I do my countdown entry, and from the lyrics of the two songs in that entry I draw my title. I can't convince myself that I can write an entry anymore without such a title, or to "waste" a title on an entry that's just the countdown. Or something. That's the obsessive-compulsive side of me. Or perhaps just the hobgoblins of foolish consistency.

I have often seen people who have more than one blog/journal. Sherry has a blog for short entries and a journal for longer entries, both on her own site. TranceJen has a Diaryland site for her journal, and a LiveJournal for quizzes. Zannah has a blog for links, a journal for longer entries, and...something else...for shorter daily entries.

I can see that being able to let things out in short entries would make it less likely for long entries to come out. But then I think, my long entries aren't coming out anyway! So what do I have to lose?

I hadn't realized that LiveJournal had tightened its admissions recently, though. You either have to have an invite from an existing member, or you have to pay. It makes a certain amount of sense. They make the code free, so anyone can start their own LiveJournalesque site with different limitations. It's big enough that it can't be accused of being cliquish.
Getting an invite will hardly be a problem. Last time I checked, at least half a dozen former talk.bizarre folks had LJ sites, and some of them should be kindly disposed towards me. I'll try to put something on my sidebar, at the very least, if and when I get a LiveJournal site.

I've been doing a lot of weird things lately, sort of comic-related.

Rereading my X-Men comics for some reason made me dig out my old Marvel Super-Heroes RPG boxed set. I had this urge to create my own world of mutants, and possibly other heroes as well, and see what happened.

It's hard to create decent characters, of course. I've been mostly rolling them up, and sometimes it doesn't work that well. Not to mention having characters with Strength Feeble(1) and Fighting Excellent(16) or something.

Then, in another fit of geekiness, I decided that I wanted to figure out where my mutants came from. By random means, of course. So what I needed was population tables, the more specific the better.

It's pretty hard to find, and download, the appropriate data from Census web sites, but I managed to find some for Canada, at least, from last year. The entire population of Canada, broken down into cities, counties, towns, or whatever census units they came up with.

I whipped up some code to loop through it, with a 1/1,000,000 chance of every person being a mutant. I quickly discovered that shortcomings of Microsoft Access's pseudorandom number generation. Whatever cycle length it has before the whole sequence of numbers repeats again, it's definitely lower than 38 million. I noticed it because there was a weird cluster of mutants in Calgary, and then another one later on. But I can deal with a cluster of mutants in Calgary.

I know that it's just another project I will never finish...but I enjoy the process more than I enjoy finishing things, really.

Reading the X-Men guide spurred me on, too. One thing I always wanted was to be able to construct an intricately woven storyline like that. Though Nicole says that that is, basically, a soap opera. The X-Men universe comes complete with evil twins/clones, obscure deaths and frequent resurrections, and even children who age offscreen(say, by being sent into the future and brought back as adults).

I confess a certain curiosity to actually read some of the comics from after my time. I also confess that I can't stand most of the modern comic art that I see, though. It all seems to look the same, which makes me wonder who they're all emulating. Art was never the reason I liked a comic book, though. It's hard for me to even pay attention to it sometimes, though I try. For instance, I decided that Paul Smith was one of my favourite artists from the X-Men run, though John Byrne seems to epitomize the characters best.

I took a quick look in at a nearby comic store for back issues. I managed to fill a couple of gaps, #128(the end of the Proteus storyline) and #135(the one where Dark Phoenix destroys a star). When I opened up #135, it seemed like the pages were stuck together...but only for the first half of the issue. Was it stuck? I tugged a little bit, but not too much. Then I happened to notice the problem. It was stapled an inch or two from the spine. In fact, those were the only staples holding it together--the copy had obviously slipped when being stapled, or something.

I took out the staples, but I haven't yet managed to restaple it properly. My stapler isn't deep enough to insert a whole comic page, and without the little curved notch at the bottom of the stapler, the staple won't curve back on itself properly. If I can find two staples and unfold both of them, maybe... I haven't tried to get a discount from the comic store owner, since likely he hadn't noticed.

I've considered going on to reread the New Mutants as well, but I never liked those quite as well, especially the early issues. There's also X-Factor and Excalibur, neither of which I have very much of. But for now I'll hold off.

I finished reading The Years of Rice And Salt. It was fitfully interesting, but started to drag towards the end, IMHO. The fact that you switched characters and plotlines(if any)every hundred pages made it difficult to maintain interest. Though it is nice to see an alternate history with this kind of scope, the lack of character continuity is why they usually don't make good novels. The reincarnation thing also faded out towards the end, as the general culture became more secular, I guess. So, in a nutshell, I don't think it'll be my top choice for the Hugo novel. I'll have to figure that out sometime before the end of the month...

That book took me more than a week, so it was nice to go on to something shorter: the Explorer anthology, edited by Julie Czerneda. This is from a series of SF anthologies aimed at kids, and it's quite short. Five stories, and each of those is under twenty large-print pages. I finished that in about an hour and a half of total reading.

I still want something quick to read, so now I'm 60 pages into Driving Force by Dick Francis. It's not that involving so far, but maybe that's because I was reading it while Simon and Luke were playing in the living room, not a good environment for undivided attention. Nicole, trained from reading on the school bus, can read oblivious to such distractions, but I have no such training. I can read with music in the background, and that's about it.

I'm going to end it here, with another countdown entry. I have sent off an email to a former t.ber on LiveJournal, so hopefully in a day or two I'll get started on there. Hopefully I won't abandon this one entirely...

308. Laurie Anderson: Born, Never Asked, from Big Science

I have a few versions of this song. The version on "Big Science" has a spoken intro followed by what is mostly a violin instrumental, with a few more spoken words. On "United States Live", though, the spoken intro is part of "So Happy Birthday", and the instrumental is called "For A Large And Changing Room", which is a great title IMHO. There is also a version of "Born, Never Asked" proper, without the spoken intro, and with a more drawn-out coda.

But it's mostly the violin music that I like. It's a very dramatic piece, which probably has some synth underpinnings now that I think about it. Anderson was "classically trained"(as they always say)on the violin, I believe, and here you can really tell, because it's exquisite.

307. Happy Rhodes: Runners, from Equipoise

This song, like many of Happy Rhodes's, benefits from the contrast between the upper and lower registers of her voice(so frequently misidentified as "Kate Bush and Annie Lennox"). The chorus, in the lower register, is sinister; the verses, in the upper register, sound sprightlier, but the lyrics have an undertone of menace to them as well. The song is about trying to survive all the dangers of the modern world, and also about worrying about them to the point of paranoia.

Heck's Angels: Born to be Mild.

2003-07-08T22:48:00.000-06:00

Run Wild With The Buffalo

See, what did I tell you. July. It wasn't a self-fulfilling prophecy, I swear.

Do I still have any regular readers? There's still the odd click-through from someone linking to me, but half the hits I've gotten since my last post were people searching for that Melanie Doane song. Well, it's not like checking me out daily is likely to be very rewarding.

Things do seem to be improving slightly. Nicole's parents and my dad have come over with reasonable frequency, babysitting and what-have-you, and often doing chores like lawn mowing and washing dishes. Some neighbourhood teens did some mowing for us a few times, for $5 a yard--which is probably sidewalk robbery, but I don't complain too heartily, because it's worth it to me.

Our back yard is getting pretty bad, though. Some of the thistles, especially close to the fence, are now a few feet high. No way I could mow them down now anyway. And there's still tons of dandelions. Maybe when we go to Toronto, and we won't be around for a few days, we could arrange for someone to come and kill all our weeds. The kids will me staying with Nicole's parents, and hopefully not around to eat poisoned plants. Luke is still putting things in his mouth, though not as much as he once did; Simon is not as much of a problem. He might be allergic to clover, too.

Getting someone to do it when we're away might be a bit more of a problem. Maybe I should get my uncle Daryl to do it; he's got a lawn care business, and it'll be easier for me to arrange things. In the short term, we should try to borrow Nicole's dad's weed-eater.

The company I work for has moved offices. Our old office was a little bit too large for our modestly-sized company, and I got the feeling we weren't getting along with the current landlords. Edna had looked into moving a few times, but we always ended up renegotiating our lease instead. Not this time. This time we went through with it.

We're still close to the same place, because Dick & Edna want the office to be within reasonable walking distance of their house. We're now on 124th street, in a five-storey building. We're still settling in, a process which has been complicated by everyone taking turns going on holiday. It might be a month or two before everything's organized and/or unpacked.

We have underground parking now, too, though it's at a different building. There's three close together, you see, and I guess the one parkade is full or something. So while I will still have to venture outside to get to work, the car itself won't have to, say, get brushed off in the winter. And it won't get that sticky tree-leaf stuff on the windshield.

We have a funky little security card like I hadn't seen before. It's plastic and mostly unmarked--no magnetic strip or anything, but there's obviously a heavier core. You wave it close to this sensor which looks like four lights in a square, and somehow it senses the card and turns green. It's all very high-tech.

Not being there when Edna & Janet were picking their parkade stalls, I ended up with the very bottommost, the highest number. It's not even listed on the directions--I'm in 182, and the signs in the stairwell say like "101-133 ->" and "<- 134-181". No 182. It's behind a pillar, and located such that when I come down the ramp to the last level, I basically have to do a 180° turn to the left to get into it. There's not much clearance, either. I supposed I'll eventually get the hang of it.

The first two days I came in, after the move, there was someone parked in the spot, which I guess had been unassigned for a while. So I had to go all the way back up the parkade and then park on the street. And when I saw "on the street", I mean "three blocks away". Property values are pretty high in that area, and a lot of places are "No Parking 8:00-10:00", which discourages the working crowd. There's one street where parking is permitted. Anyway, Edna had a talk to the building manager, and my spot has been free ever since. Which is good, because I don't see how you could possibly tow a car out of it.

Weather has been quite pleasant, at least for me. By that, I mean that we are spared the never-ending sweltering 30+ °C weather, the stifling humidity, and the general uninhabitibility of the upper two stories of the house during the majority of the day. We are also spared the general drought driving up forest-fire risk and making it barely necessary to mow one's lawn unless one is foolish enough to water it(when such is not expressly forbidden).

No, instead we have cloudy days, cool days that are at least around 20 °C, and fairly frequent rain. I think it's raining right now, though it's hard to tell in the basement. I heard a bit of thunder, and, since the baby monitor is still on, I can hear what sounds like rain hitting Simon's window.

That's another benefit of the underground parking--no more sunlight heating up the inside of my car so that even on a moderately sunny day, it's an oven. It's always nice and cool seven levels down(or however many--I haven't counted yet)in the parkade.

Unfortunately, my office window faces east. If it's sunny in the morning, then not only is my office often uncomfortably warm(unless the blinds are closed), but it's too bright. I have to squint at the screen of my computer, or hold up a hand to shade it. This kind of thing is why I really don't like sunlight. As far as I'm concerned, it can be cloudy all day long, or you can just put me underground.

I've been trying to read some of the Hugo and Nebula nominees before Worldcon. I think the voting deadline is the end of July, so I might make it.

I did finish Ties of Power, and I decided that, even though it is an Aurora nominee, I am not going to read the next book in the series, To Trade The Stars. It was just too annoying. Which is really a shame, because I like her Web Shifters series, and the(so-far)standalone In The Company of Others. It's just the Trade Pact books that make me grit my teeth.

Then, as I said, I went on to China Miéville's The Scar. That book took me a long time to read as well, but was a bit more rewarding. Miéville's style is a bit difficult, and his pace is often glacial, but it is almost overcome by the richness and exoticness of the world he builds, especially when it comes to names. Most of the names are based squarely in English(Miéville is British), and yet they still seem exotic. I made a list of ship names from the book--there are quite a few of them, for reasons I won't spoil here--which I'll have to use in Lorenai or something.

It's a book that seems better to me now than it did when I was reading it. A few times I almost winced at the transparentness when the "scar" image kept coming up, and every character had something to say about it. But, in the end, Miéville pulls it off, and he might well get a high Hugo vote from me.

After The Scar I went straight to Harry Potter & The Order of The Phoenix. It took me longer than I meant to get to it. When it came in on the 21st, we were lucky to be home to receive it, since my cousin Tammy's wedding was that day--in Edmonton, luckily. I was still reading Ties of Power, so Nicole got to read it first. And then, on Sunday night, when I had finished my book, Nicole was still reading it...and on Monday morning as well. So I had to pick another book to take with me to work on Monday(The Scar), because...well, I think a lunch break is wasted if I don't have a book to read. And then it took me until the next weekend to finish that one.

I took June 30th off because July 1st is a Canadian holiday--Canada Day, the equivalent to July 4th in the States, even though we did nothing so dramatic as a revolution. We just sent some legislation through the British Parliament, and there we were, our own nation. Anyway, I read the book that weekend. I stayed up until after 1:00 on the night of the 1st(though part of that was a stupid desire to update my Cygwin installation at 10:30 PM), before Nicole got me to go to bed, with 100 pages left. (Then she had some food poisoning or something and spent some time throwing up, which helped us get lots of sleep...) I finished it in the morning, though.

The book itself? Well, I'd have to say that it was a rip-roaring addition to the Harry Potter œuvre, and now I have to wait for the next one? The level of conflict in the Harry Potter world is definitely escalating, and with any luck there will have to be a bit less sneaking around in the last two books. (And I was right--Harry does get to teach "Defense Against The Dark Arts"! Sort of.) I don't want to spoil it too much for anyone who might happen to read my site, and most people don't need me to give too much background, but suffice it to say: It is worth it to read it now.

From that one I went on to an Aurora nominee, Karin Lowachee's Warchild. This is also a first novel, and in fact a winner of the Time-Warner First Novel Contest. And it's a really good novel, too. It starts with the main character being eight years old, and the things he undergoes from that age onward are often quite harrowing. He has to deal with issues of trust and betrayal on a regular basis, and it's a wonder he doesn't end up more screwed up than he does. An excellent book, and probably deserves whatever awards it can get. (John W. Campbell, at least, and possibly Philip K. Dick, and maybe even the Aurora.)

Now I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice & Salt, which I believe is the last of the Hugo nominees. It's sort of an alternate history--the population of Europe is almost completely wiped out by the Black Plague, so the cultures of Islam and China dominate the world. But while we start with a journey through the fringes of the shattered continent of Europe, it's not a focus of the book. The focus is on the journey of two souls, "B" and "K", who are reincarnated over and over again into different forms and cultures, moving us forward through history but also through their own spiritual development. (Their particular incarnations always happen to have the same first letter, so you can tell who they are...) You get numerous afterlife scenes, which I suppose should technically make the book fantasy, although Stranger In A Strange Land had them too, didn't it?

Not much for nonfiction. I have been reading Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook, in an attempt, perhaps, to rekindle my interest in blogging. There's always other things to do, though, unfortunately.

I have started a project I'd been considering for while, which I'm calling a "Wheel of Time Concordance". It's not really a "concordance", because I believe that to do that I'd have to tally and index every word in Robert Jordan's series, but I am trying to go through the books and painstakingly note down every character's appearance, synopsize the events of each chapter, and generally keep track of things in a systematic way. I'm up to Chapter 9 of the first book, The Eye of The World, and the project is holding my interest.

There's not as much to keep track of in this book, as I recall--not as many ongoing characters introduced, that is, though a lot of history is covered. This is really the first good reread I've given this book, though--I did go through it for my namelist project, but I could skim over whole chapters and just look for proper nouns without reading much more than that. But there's lots of things that have significance to me now, after ten books, that meant little or nothing on first read. Like Rand's dream of Tar Valon as a place of menace, for instance. Which won't mean much to most of you, of course...*

Lots of other projects ongoing too, but with luck I will have time to talk about that before August rolls around.

310. Kate Bush: The Night of The Swallow, from The Dreaming

"The Dreaming" is the most innovative of Kate Bush's albums, but also the least accessible. Her lyrics are often cryptic, and this song is really no exception, but musically it's more listenable than some of the songs, particularly the Irish fiddle sections. It has a real sense of drama, that the characters in the song are getting involved with something they won't be able to handle, though it seems like a simple job, "a hired plane, no names mentioned". You could base a whole movie on what's said and implied in this song.

309. Five Guys Named Moe: She's On A Mountain, from Five Guys Named Moe

I believe this band is pretty obscure, possibly a local Alberta band, and they might not be the only ones to use the name. But I found myself liking this album more and more as I listened to it, and this song in particular. The drums, vocals, and rhythm guitars all combine to propel it forward, and the harmonies make it compelling.

Making your day more daylike.

2003-06-19T00:08:00.000-06:00

We Travel On The Quiet Road

Yeah, I'm on again. After this you won't see me until July--not an assurance, just a prediction based on past behaviour.

I actually almost felt like doing writing tonight, but guess what? I didn't. It took me too long to try to decide on a project to actually work on. My novels are too daunting, even though I kind of feel like I should try to whip _The Shadow & The Flame_ into shape for Worldcon. Even my short stories, the ones that need revision, are pretty daunting. Starting a new one would require me to come up with an idea--which I've been known to do from only four words, but I just wasn't in the mood. The only story I have in progress, which I started back in April...of last year, I think...doesn't inspire me. So here I am, instead.

It's a good sign, though. Civilization is not eating my brain right now, and neither are the X-Men comics sitting beside me right now, being resistible. I'm up to #170, into a stretch where there were never that many gaps, so little is new and exciting.

My current book is not captivating, either. I'm reading Julie Czerneda's Ties of Power, second in her "Trade Pact Universe" series, because the third one, To Trade The Stars, is an Aurora nominee this year. I read A Thousand Words For Stranger when it came out, and was underwhelmed. It was overwritten, and badly in need of editing(if that's not redundant), and it did that annoying thing where some chapters are in first person and some in third person. The only novel I can think of where that was done well is Spider Robinson's Mindkiller. But I digress.

So I've been dawdling in Ties of Power, even though I've got China Miéville's The Scar sitting there, due back to the library on the 28th, one of the Hugo nominees I haven't read yet. I've also got Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice & Salt, but that one has managed to come out in paperback so I got a reprieve from the library copy. There's also Karin Lowachee's Warchild, another Aurora nominee(that's for Canadian SF, FYI). Let's not forget that Darren's copy of Harry Potter & The Order of The Phoenix comes in on the weekend--we're taking delivery of it for him because he made the silly mistake of going to Europe for a month and a half, and leaving three days before the new Potter. He'll get to read it in August. Hee.

I've been reading a lot of other stuff, too, of course...

Susan Blackmore: The Meme Machine. Nonfiction, but on the topic of memes, which I love. It's an attempt to start off a real science of memetics, so it doesn't always take the focus I would like. For instance, it's not, in general, an attempt to catalogue memes, but an attempt to use the existence of memes, and their general characteristics, to make predictions and explanations that match reality better than other theories. In that aim, it's fairly successful.

It seems to outdo biogenetics in providing reasons for many human behaviours--they're not encoded into the genes, but they are successful meme complexes that tend to dominate other memes. Memetics also seems to explain such things as the rise of agriculture, the development of human brain and of language, and religious celibacy. Agriculture is actually nobody's idea of a good life, compared with hunting & gathering, but it necessitates large families, so a growing population, and a hunger for more land for that population to cultivate. So cultures with that meme take over from cultures without it, simply by outnumbering them. (Not to mention all those diseases that originated with farm animals...)

Most interesting was the theory that the "I" of self-awareness and consciousness is mostly a construct exploited by memes who are constantly trying to say "I believe..." or "I want...". On Blackmore's web site, she said that she's working on a textbook on theories of consciousness--not just presenting her own, but examining others put forth throughout history. That sounds interesting too.

Maybe I should change the description of my blog to something about spreading memes... Have to think about that one.

Robert J. Sawyer:Humans. This is the second book in his "Neanderthal Parallax" series, and while it isn't quite as exciting as the first one, Hominids, it's not too bad. Doesn't have much of a plot, apart from the two main characters(one "human", one "Neanderthal")eventually deciding that they should try to have a relationship, despite their cultural differences. So, in some ways, it's just a love story, with a lot of neat SF stuff thrown in. I don't think it will get my Aurora vote this year...

Dean R. Koontz:The Servants of Twilight. Not one of his best, either. It has some promising elements, but in many ways it's a bit too formula...single mother with young boy is threatened by bad guys, seeks help of nice-but-tough guy(in this case, a private eye). Nice guy falls head-over-heels in love with single mother, which develops quickly into a physical relationship. In this case, the bad guys were revealed a little too soon--we had many viewpoint chapters from them, so there was little mystery to the reader about what was actually happening. Things get worse and worse and worse--just like Koontz prescribes in his How To Write Bestselling Fiction book--and then, at the end, the resolution is so improbable I almost laughed out loud. The supernatural elements are barely there--not that Koontz feels required to include them if he can use a mundane explanation instead(like he did in The House of Thunder). Oh, and there's a dog--two dogs, really. Okay, it kept the pages turning, but it felt a little empty.

Stephen R. Donaldson:The Man Who Killed His Brother. This is the first of a series of mainstream mysteries that was originally released under the pseudonym "Reed Stephens" in the early 80's. I'd managed to find a copy of the second one, and the library had the third one; this one has now been rereleased under Donaldson's name, and I think there was supposed to be a new, fourth one out, too. It's a bit short, compared to books these days, but that's not always a bad thing.

The first-person protagonist--whose POV Donaldson sticks to throughout the story--is interesting, one of those self-destructive characters Donaldson does so well. He did, in fact, kill his brother, by accident, and as a result has become an alcoholic. His partner, from when he was a P.I., drags him out of the bars and sobers him up to help on a case every once in a while. This time is different, because it's his brother's daughter who's disappeared, and he doesn't get the time he usually needs to dry out. So he goes through the pains of alcohol withdrawal during the course of the book.

I found the villain a little easy to spot--I had him pegged from his first introduction as a likely suspect, and he stayed likely throughout the book. Still, there was a little more to it than that, and it was an enjoyable read. Definitely have to try the next book someday.

John Emsley: The 13th Element:The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire & Phosphorus. This is one of the nonfiction books that Darren lent me a while back, and I found it quite interesting. It's sort of like a biography of a chemical element--phosphorus, of course--from its first discovery by alchemists in the 1700's to the present day. It covers such topics as its use as a medicine, despite its toxicity, through to the 20th century; the match-making industry, and the human tragedy of its working conditions in the 1800's; various cases of murder by phosphorus poisoning on record; the development of nerve gases and pesticides; and the truth about phosphorus detergents.

The latter was among the most interesting. The initial conclusion was that an increase in phosphates in sewage water was causing extreme algae blooms, to deleterious effect. Phosphates were lobbied against, and generally reduced by detergent manufactures. Several well-reputed scientific studies have demonstrated since, though, that likely the problem was a different set of toxins, which reduced the numbers of the zooplankton that ate the algae, swelling the algae through lack of predation. This is the kind of thing that encourages me to continue not trusting the simplest explanations..."Even Occam occasionally cut himself shaving."

Alexei Panshin: Masque World. This was the third book in Panshin's Anthony Villiers series, dating back thirty years or more. I read the first book, Star Well, long ago, and recall liking it well enough, if finding it somewhat reminiscent of Jack Vance. I hadn't realized that The Thurb Revolution, which I have not yet read, came next, though I doubt it really mattered. The fourth book, The Universal Pantograph, though advertised at the back of this one, has yet to see the light of day.

The book is almost devoid of plot, in the sense that there is little conflict or complication. There are whimsical characters, perhaps too many of them. There is a highly intrusive narrative voice, which is fitfully amusing, but more often just pretentious. And the whole thing fails to congeal into anything much.

For another viewpoint on the Villiers books, here's an article at Strange Horizons on their recent rerelease in one volume. From the sounds of it, I should be looking forward to reading The Thurb Revolution, notwithstanding the disappointments of this one.

Cory Doctorow:Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. Doctorow is a web-celebrity, and this is his first novel. It's interesting, though barely short enough to be published on its own, especially these days. And while its events and characters are interesting, if not absorbing, the background is almost too improbable to consider.

Money has been eliminated, as has involuntary death, due to cloning, brain-backup, and the like. Money has been replaced by an intangible called "Whuffie", which is just, in general, the regard that one receives from other people. Popular people have lots of Whuffie, unpopular people have little. I find it hard to think of how this revolution might have taken place, despite a few scenes shown in flashback of the development of the Ad-Hocracy. (A term right out of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, as I recall...)

The main character, who lives and works in Disneyworld with his "ad-hoc", is faced with conflict involving a rival ad-hoc that moves in and takes over a neighbouring ride, and seems to have sights on the other ad-hoc's territory... Our hero is often a bit annoying in his reactions, albeit in a realistically human way. He's not always that likeable, though generally his Whuffie drops when he's not. It all works out okay in the end, more or less.

What I found annoying, though, was the whole "Whuffie" thing. Not so much the concept, as the very word. "Whuffie". What is it? The term was never explained in the book; nobody seems to have been credited with coming up with it, there's no hint of its origin. The best I could think of was an acronym--WFI? WFE? World Friendship Index? Whatever. So after I read the book, I went looking on the Web, where I was confident I would find an explanation. And I did. It's a term that his friends used in high school(which I now discover is thought to originate from "woofing" at Arsenio Hall shows). ...Yeah. Something that Cory Doctorow's friends used in high school is going to be a term that catches on all over the world. Maybe now, because of the book and the website spreading the meme...but it's an annoying word, and I hope it dies a horrible, painful death. Uncharitable of me? Perhaps. And maybe I wouldn't have been able to come up with any better. But I like to think I could have...

William Gibson:Pattern Recognition. I'm not a rabid Gibson fan. His cyberpunk trilogy was okay, and I'd have to say that I liked Count Zero a bit better than Neuromancer. Idoru was a good book, and All Tomorrow's Parties not bad either. But this is definitely my favourite of his so far.

It's barely science-fictional, though it is up-to-the-minute, with "google" used as a verb, for instance. The main character, a woman with an allergy to trademark symbols(the Michelin Man, for instance, makes her quite sick), is one of many who is obsessed with this sequence of short films, "The Footage", which has been released mysteriously over the Net, a piece at a time, over a period of time. She is hired to try to find The Footage's origin, with the aid of a colourful crew of acquaintances, and against the resistance of a jealous adversary. It doesn't sound exciting, but it's spellbinding. Gibson's characterization is sure, and manipulations of unrelated and seeming unrelated events is deft. I highly recommend it, even if you can't stand that cyberpunk stuff.

Lynn Abbey:Sanctuary. I don't think I ever actually posted a review of this book. It was a bit slow going, but I did finish it. It's been a long time since I last read Thieves' World books, and some of the references might have gone by me, but in many ways it stands on its own. It refers to the series, but now in a way that someone who hasn't read it will miss a whole lot.

Almost all the characters are new creations, and while our main protagonist is sometimes annoyingly stubborn, he does okay in the end. Almost more interesting than the actual plot of the book is the backstory of what happened in the interval between the end of the shared-world anthology series and this book. Some of those elements are crucial to the plot, but the book could have been much tighter without them. The book had practically better be setting up for a new series of anthologies, or at least novels. It'll catch the nostalgia crowd, like me, at least.

And that's about it. Never fear, there's always more to come...

Getting late, so on to the countdown:

312. Billy Joel:Don't Ask Me Why, from Glass Houses

This song is an excellent blend of wry but witty lyrics, jaunty music(a lot of rhythm guitar, but with occasional flamenco breaks), and Joel's fine, clear vocals. It's fun to sing along with, and that's certainly part of what I look for.

311. Talking Heads:The Overload, from Remain In Light

I remember describing this song to someone as "mostly instrumental". It does have lyrics, but they are almost such a part of the slow, deep, menacing music that they meld with it seamlessly. This is from an album where apparently the music came first before the lyrics, and here I can certainly believe it.

Different all twisty a of in maze are you, passages little.

2003-06-17T22:44:00.000-06:00

What Took Me So Long?

June also seems to be a busy month.

So what have I been doing for the past few weeks? Well, still playing a lot of Civilization, and reading a number of books. Weekends busy with family or other tasks, and I don't know if that's going to clear up before July, at this rate.

We did manage to go out and see one movie, "X2:X-Men United". And that's got me rereading my X-Men comics.

I inherited at least the start of my comic book collection from my brother, though I kept it up myself for a few years. He started collecting X-Men with fair consistency from #130 onward, and with some back-issue shopping(and the help of the "Classic X-Men" reprint series), I've filled in most of the gaps from #93 through to #230-#240. I started to slow down my comic buying around the time of #200-#210, mostly out of disenchantment with all the world-wrenching plotlines and multiple crossovers that were plaguing Marvel Comics at the time. I'm still tentatively pushing forward in the timeline.

The movie was okay, but nothing great. The wholesale messing around with the team's background is the most annoying part. Rogue and Wolverine joining at the same time, Iceman being a student while Cyclops and Storm are full members... Colossus and Kitty Pryde being minor characters, and Nightcrawler just being introduced. (And who was that kid with the scream? Was that supposed to be Siryn?) Not to mention that Magneto and Mystique never worked together, that I'm aware of...

Then again, for all I know they reinvented the entire team and its history ten years after I stopped reading. All I know is the classic Chris Claremont stuff.

At least it looks like they might be setting up for the Phoenix storyline for the next movie. Especially with the ending shot...I half expected Phoenix to come shooting up out of the water right then, but I guess we'll have to wait until the next movie for that. Of course, unless they're going to introduce the Hellfire Club and the Shi'ar Empire(neither of which would bother me in the least), they're going to be messing with that storyline too.

It seems to me, though, that movies are just the wrong way to bring a comic book series to the screen. A series was a continuous thing, with no definite end in sight. I remember Jon Ostrander(of "Grimjack")comparing a series to a short work like "Dark Knight" or "Watchmen" and pointing out that while those told great stories, there was still merit in writing an ongoing work that followed characters for a longer span of time. He did it, Claremont did it, and so have a few others. Robert Jordan is practically doing it, albeit in prose.

So, obviously, what's needed is a TV series. Maybe it's not yet feasible to produce the kind of FX that would be required for a weekly series, but hey, Babylon 5 managed pretty damn well. Maybe not yet, but in a few years.

Of course, the problem would be where, precisely, to start. The pre-Claremont X-Men was, from what I've heard and what I've read myself, often pretty bad. But where would you be without Cyclops and Jean Grey's history, without their history with villains like Magneto and The Blob, etc.? For that matter, without all the other Marvel comic books--the Beast was with the Avengers during most of the Claremont run, the Fantastic Four guest-starred, and the whole Ms. Marvel/Rogue/Carol Danvers/Binary thing involves a lot of backstory.

But all that could be dropped in. It'd be nice to consider the team to have a bit of history, and flashbacks could be done genteelly. If I ran my own TV station and had unlimited dollars to play with, you bet your ass they'd be casting the show right now. Right along with Robert Jordan's.

We're in the middle of moving our office right now. The space we have is too large for the size of our company, and we're paying too much for it. They've looked at moving before, but this time it's really going to happen.

We'll be in a slightly larger building--fourth of five floors instead of second of two--with underground parking, an elevator, a real lobby, and all that. After parking my car outside in rain, snow, relentless sunlight, and whatever guck comes off of the trees from the apartment building next door, I'm really looking forward to the underground parking. Plus, I get a taxable benefit on my T4 slip! (That's a tax thing, for you non-Canadians...)

This week will hopefully be the worst. I actually took a few boxes, mostly containing computers, monitors, and scanners, over this morning, so I've finally gotten to see it. It is of course smaller than ours, but mostly it's narrower. Our "lunchroom" is six feet wide--no way we'll get a table in there. I will probably be eating at my desk or something. Friday is the official move day, but that's mostly just our furniture--what we're taking with us and not trying desperately to sell off so we don't have to pay someone to take it to the dump.

I've been mostly doing reading for the last few weeks. I've got enough of it--books on RMI, Enterprise Java Beans(which is not what Riker has in his coffee), Jakarta Struts, Extreme Programming, Ant, and all sorts of things. Extreme Programming is the most interesting, as a whole new programming methodology, which feels more in tune with what I've always done than the more traditional software engineering methods ever did.

Part of Extreme Programming is the practice of "pair programming". Apparently, if done properly(which may take a few months of getting used to, apparently), two programmers who are working together at the same terminal--only one typing at a time, obviously, but perhaps switching off--it can be faster and more productive than two programmers working separately. Unintuitive, but they must've done studies or they wouldn't be claiming it, right? So we've sort of been trying it.

We made a recent sale of our software to Russia--well, Kazakhstan, really. I know it's not Russia in any way, but it's part of the former Soviet Union, and there's still a lot of Russian spoken and written. So we brought in a translator, a Russian student studying at the U. of A., on his summer break. When they found out that he had some Java experience too, they decided he could be my pair-programming partner.

It's slow going so far--I've got some initial design worked out, which is supposedly all I really need with Extreme Programming, and I'm still trying to figure out Struts and JSP and EJB, which are going to be at the core of the software. Ilya(not his real name)has probably spent about as much time learning Java as I have, but we probably covered vastly different areas. Hopefully we will both learn something, but he still seems to be struggling to keep up, so I've been doing most of the typing. When I don't get stuck for three days on a seemingly basic area of Struts that I can't get to work right.

And he'll be going back to school in the fall, too. Well, we'll see how it works out.

I'm very far behind on the CDs, and, let's face it, I will probably never get caught up. But I'll try to mention a few highlights--the ones that make it onto my wishlist, to start.

Meredith Brooks' "Bad Bad One" is much better than her last album, "Deconstruction", more on a par with her first, "Blurring The Edges". Looking at the cover photos practically tells the story--"Deconstruction"'s was immaculately made up and airbrushed, but the other two show Brooks more unkempt, more her real self. "Blurring The Edges" was riding on Alanis Morissette's wave, and it has to be said that the strongest song from "Bad Bad One" is probably the most Alanis-like, "You Don't Know Me". The rest of the album is somewhere between there and Pink, which is not necessarily a bad thing; the most Pink-like is perhaps "Pleasure", which features Jennifer Love Hewitt on backup vocals. "Walk Away" seems to be moving in her own direction, though, with a more idiosyncratic sound.

Incubus's "Morning View" was a pleasant surprise for me. I confess that I had them filed under "heavy metal" in my mind, and was expecting another sludge-rock band. Instead, I found something that, while perhaps on the heavier side of rock, was still trying harder to make interesting music than to stun with a wall of guitars and bass. Its closing track, "Aqueous Transmission", was a wonderful sonic sculpture.

Pink's "Missundaztood" was also a great album. I'd heard lots of it on the radio, and I'd still have to say that "Don't Let Me Get Me" and "Get The Party Started" are among the best songs on the album. But the rest of the album holds up too, with lots of contributions from Linda Perry(she does seem to get around these days...) I don't know how autobiographical the lyrics are supposed to be, but a lot of them, in some quite powerful songs, allude to a very unhappy childhood.

When I listened to Kim Barlow's "Gingerbread", I was expecting yet another lyrics-heavy folk-songwriter album, like Gillian Welch or something. But instead, I found that Barlow was an innovative songwriter who was willing to spend as much time on her music as on her lyrics. The latter could be quite affecting, like in the sad story of the anorexic girl in "Like A Baby", or in the wry Hansel & Gretel update of the title track, where the brother and sister mistake each other for the evil witch in an interesting look at gender politics.

Jewel's "This Way" was also somewhat more interesting musically than her previous albums, as the dynamic leadoff track "Standing Still" had already alerted me. And, again her lyrics were often thoughtful, as in "The New Wild West" and "Serve The Ego". It's good to hear her stretching her musical wings.

Neko Case's "Blacklisted" is still filed under "country", but you're never going to hear her music at the Grand Ol' Opry. It is still closer to that genre than to any other, but she's not playing for country radio. The most striking song on the album is "Stinging Velvet"--not quite as mesmerizing as the title track to "Furnace Room Lullaby", but still quite nifty. "Things That Scare Me" and "Pretty Girls" are also standout tracks.

You know, apart from Incubus those are all female vocalists. After Michelle Branch, I thought I was starting to get tired of female singer-songwriters in the legions that seemed to emerge after Alanis Morissette's success. I guess I'm not. I'll still take a constant stream of those against a diet of Default, The Calling, Nickelback, and Lifehouse any day.

My car's tape deck has been almost nonfunctional in the mornings, for some reason, so I've been listening to more radio than usual. Most of that is still the university station, but some of that is "96X" as well. I'm somewhat impressed by the Ataris' cover of "Boys of Summer", which manages to be faithful both to the band's own sound and the original version. I was able to recognize it from the opening guitar line, for instance, and I thought it was quite amusing the way they changed the Deadhead sticker for a Black Flag one. But I still don't like the Ataris' sound overall--the singing is fine, but the guitars are still too punk(or is that emo?).

A song that's getting airplay in Canada, at least, is the latest from Melanie Doane, "Still Desire You". The line at the heart of the song is "You leave a lot to be desired, but I still desire you", and that's pretty much the central message--how it's possible to be in love with someone who's far from perfect. Doane was almost a one-hit wonder, with her wonderful "Adam's Rib" from a few years ago, but I'm glad she was able to resurface. I think Doane herself is a violinist, but this song is pretty straightforward alt-rock.

For some reason I've started collecting vanity license plates. Not the plate themselves--that would, of course, be stealing--but I have been jotting down their contents when I see them. I'm averaging about 2-3 a day.

Alberta is not the best place for license-plate hunting, though, because a few years ago, in what was probably a cost-saving measure, it was decreed that you only need to put a license plate on the rear bumper of your car. Some people still have old ones they put on the front, or you can get joke plates as well. But the net result is that I can't scope out the plates of cars that are facing towards me.

I started my list when I saw a Ford Windstar with the provocative plate "J 007 B". Yes, James Bond's minivan. I'd seen a pickup truck with "WAZNTME" parked on our street for a few months now. And I've seen many(though only one recently)of the form "VE6ILU", which don't really look like vanity plates...but unless I'm mistaken, that looks like a ham radio callsign. I even saw a Nevada plate that said "H82LOSE".

The most inscrutable one so far was "EPILUNG". A Google search on that pulls up zilch, and it's been a long time since I saw that. Maybe it's an Indonesian given name or something.

There's probably a site out there for vanity plates, but I'm too lazy to look for it right now.

Time to sign off now, with another pair from the laboriously climbing countdown of my favourite songs:

314. Alanis Morissette:Head Over Feet, from Jagged Little Pill

You can't deny the power of this album--well, you can, but I can't. This song is deceptively simple, but still compelling. And for some reason I keep wanting to sing it like David Bowie or something. Well, that's just me, I guess.

313. Paul McCartney:Take It Away, from Tug of War

This song takes me way back, to when this was one of a very albums that I listened to over and over again. I could practically sing this entire album from memory. But this song has held up over the years, as a simple tribute to--what else?--music.

'Aquarius--Abandon hope for future plans.' --They Might Be Giants, "Hide Away Folk Family"

2003-05-30T22:56:00.000-06:00

Quoiqu'on fasse ou quoiqu'on dise

May has been a busy month.

Nicole's birthday was last weekend, and her mom's birthday is this weekend. We drove up to see my mom in there too, and since then I have not, for instance, managed to catch up on dishes. Oh, and somewhere in there Nicole's aunt from California came up to visit.

At least TV is over for the season. We missed a couple of episodes of "24", but I'll bet they won't show up on reruns this summer.

We are entertaining thoughts of trying out "Buffy". Yes, that's right, we've never watched it, even though I, at least, even liked the original movie. By the time we decided it might be interesting, it was four or five seasons in, and there was too much backstory. Besides, we really didn't need another weekly hour-long series anyway. But now that it's over, and watching it is, at least in theory, an achievable goal, we're willing to try it.

The difficulty, of course, is finding all the episodes. I would think that at least some of them would be released on video or DVD. We don't have a DVD player yet, though, and generally the VHS tapes come with only two episodes each. Which would be plenty for us to watch in a week... There's also the daily reruns on Space, but an hour a day is way too much. Particularly since they seem to be in the fifth season right now, and by the time it rolls back to the beginning, it'll be getting too close to the end of summer anyway. Maybe we could try taping the whole first season or so, and then watch it spaced out while it reruns the rest of the seasons...but I don't know how long even "Buffy" is guaranteed to be rerun like that.

We'd also need to upgrade our cable package. Since the few shows we watch are generally on the networks, we downgraded to basic cable a year or so ago. I wouldn't mind starting to watch "South Park" again, either. We'll see how much money we end up spending on Worldcon, though, how affluent we feel. And whether we would end up watching enough TV to make it worth it. If our lifestyle changes(in the direction of having more free time)with Nicole's parents in town, and my dad moving down next month.

We have managed to see an above-average number of movies in the last couple of weeks, which probably contributes to my lack of contributions.

When we were visiting my mom, we ended up watching a movie on pay-per-view(they've got satellite up there, of necessity)called "Welcome To Collinwood". We hadn't heard of it before, but we picked it based on the description, and because nothing else we wanted to watch was coming on at near the right time. It was listed with William H. Macy and George Clooney starring, but that's not really accurate. It started out with Luis Guzman & Michael Jeter, then slowly accumulated more--Patricia Clarkson, Macy, Sam Rockwell, and a few others that I didn't know. Clooney had a very short scene as a safecracking teacher in a wheelchair. Macy's role as a photographer/crook with a baby to look after, because his wife was in jail(and with big sideburns)was neat to watch, and Sam Rockwell practically stole the show. Nothing works out for them, though, and in the end they're just a bunch of low-life losers, though mostly sympathetic ones. A decent movie, though Nicole didn't sit all the way through it.

For Nicole's birthday last weekend, we went out to a movie, and ended up going to "The Matrix Reloaded"(which was on at a better time than her other choice, "Identity"). I'd have to say that that was a film that lived up to expectations, on my part. Not that I was a Matrix fanatic or anything, but I thought that it was one of the few films I'd seen that was really SF, and not just sci-fi. It didn't reuse hoary old space-opera or space-horror scenery--it carved its own territory, and it wasn't afraid to complicate things. The sequel upped the stakes, and upped everything else, too. Even expecting certain scenes to come up didn't lessen the impact when they did. They just kept going, and going, until the mind just boggled that they could jack it up another level yet. Well done, the Wachowskis!

Last night, going in to the video store to use up a coupon that expired at the end of the month, I was looking for "Star Trek: Nemesis", but I guess that's not out yet; I settled for "Catch Me If You Can" instead. That was a compelling movie, too, fun to watch. Frank Abagnale was portrayed, sometimes whimsically and sometimes touchingly, by Leonardo DiCaprio, and Tom Hanks's character was surprisingly subdued, letting DiCaprio be the star. I'm glad we finally got around to seeing it.

I'm eating pistachio nuts right now. Well, not right now, because I'm typing, but...

I love pistachio nuts--they're my favourite kind of nut. I don't indulge in them too often, though. For one thing, they're a bit too salty for me, and if I eat too many then my lips get puckered, or pickled, or something, afterwards.

For another, they wreak havoc on my thumbnails. Most of them, the ones whose shells split over one end, are easy enough to pry open, but some only split down one side, or part of one side, or not at all. The partially-split ones can be pried open with some effort, and that's where the thumbnail damage comes in. If I eat them with long thumbnails, then I tear them, and I have to cut them down short; if I eat them with short thumbnails, then eventually the shells will dig in under the nail and I'll start bleeding. I have done both on this batch of nuts.

There is, of course, the nutcracker. I have to use that for the unsplit ones anyway, and now I'm starting to use it for any troublesome nut. Pistachios are not shaped very well for the nutcracker I have, anyway, the V-shaped kind, because they're quite rounded, and they slip out easily. But I can usually overmaster them.

I also kind of like pistachio ice cream, when I can get it. I first liked it on principle because it was green, before I ever ate it, and luckily it lived up to my expectations. Pistachio pudding is good too, and in my bachelor days I often mixed up instant pistachio puddings for my own delectation.

I don't eat the dyed-red kind, either. That just seems wrong.

On to the countdown:

316. Barenaked Ladies: These Apples, from Maybe You Should Drive

Looking back to BNL's second album, this was the first real sign of Ed Robertson's songwriting skill developing to the heights it attained three albums later on "Maroon". It's witty, and a bit goofy, with some manic banjo in the background, not quite the confident musical hooks he'd wield later. The lyrics tell the story of a relationship with a girl with whom he can't agree on anything whatsoever.

315. Celine Dion: Je Danse Dans Ma Tête, from Dion Chante Plamondon

I really don't mind Celine Dion when she has a decent songwriter with her, and she does a great job with Luc Plamondon's songs on this album. This song is the best, with its propulsive beats, and lyrics which(if you understand French)are a vivid depiction of songwriting right up there with Joe Walsh's "Radio Song".

"It is cellular peptide cake. With mint frosting." --Worf

2003-05-16T00:00:00.000-06:00

The Thoughts Come Flooding Back

We're heading off to the northlands, Beaverlodge area, this weekend, since my mom didn't make it down at Easter. I'm taking Friday off, too, so we can drive up and drive down and still have two actual weekend days to spend visiting. This is the Victoria Day long weekend in Canada--probably celebrating Queen Victoria's birthday. Assuming she was born on the third Monday in May. From what I gather, this is pretty close to the American "Memorial Day", but not quite the same time. My Canadian-made calendar doesn't tell me.

But I imagine you want to hear about last weekend, which I've been heretofore mum about. Fear not, I shall not forsake thee.

Last Saturday we went to Ethan's birthday party. I think I've mentioned Ethan here before--the son of a girl Nicole used to babysit. He was turning three years old, so he's about half a year younger than Simon.

The party was held at a place called "Let's Play", which was, I guess, a dedicated children's funland. I'd never really seen one of those before. Ethan seems to be a little bit autistic, but he does like to run and play, and I guess his parents often bring him here so he can go nonstop for as long as he wants. There's a small play area for younger kids, but the bigger area is pretty amazing.

It's four stories high, with tunnels and ramps and slides, sliding ropes and pools of coloured plastic balls, and everything built to kid-scale. It's also all conscientiously well-padded--any metal struts and supports are wrapped in inches of foam, and everything else is made out of plastic. Adults can go through it, but only by crouching or crawling. I discovered that it was frequently necessary. There's also netting over every conceivable opening a child might fall out of.

The security at the place is pretty good, too, and I guess it would be. Our kids got barcodes when we brought them in, and they had to be scanned out with one of Ethan's parents, who could vouch for our identity. Just good sense, covering their legal asses, and of course trying to keep the kids who come there safe and unabducted.

Simon spent a lot of time on the third floor. I think that might be because the first two levels tended to be a lot busier, with 5- to 7-year-old kids rampaging all over the place. The third level wasn't nearly as busy; there was one big huge slide down to the bottom, one space-capsule-like bubble hanging out over thin air(but surely well-secured), and the rest of it was fairly quiet. The fourth level was just a single narrow platform, and I had to boost Simon to get up there.

It was hard to get him down there, even with promises of cake, for the party, and afterwards it was almost impossible. I mean, there was no way I could have carried him out kicking and screaming. I would've had to lure him out with more chocolate. The party was in the morning, and it was close to lunchtime before we got out. We had planned to stop at the carpet store right next door to find something to cover our downstairs hallway, but we were too tired. At least, I was, having been the one crawling around after Simon.

Then there was Mother's Day. We had won some free IMAX tickets for the Odyssium theatre back at the "book launch", so we thought we'd use them. There wasn't an amazing selection of shows--I wanted to see the "Making of 'The Abyss'" one, but that's probably only at the commercial IMAX outlets. Here it was a choice between "Top Speed" and "Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure". We tried to make it to the 11:00 show, "Top Speed", but underestimated the time it would take to drive. So we had to kill time until the Antarctic one came on at noon.

Simon was uncooperative. He had decided that he didn't want to go out at all, and when we got there he didn't want to go into any of the exhibits or have any fun at all. We did find some "Brain-teaser" games in the upstairs foyer which he liked(I still don't know how you're supposed to balance nine six-inch nails on top of one standing upright), and we managed to lure him briefly into the space-oriented exhibit. But that was it.

The Antarctic film was interesting. It was the story of a failed expedition that set off in 1914, but one that everybody managed to get home from, at least. Shackleton's ship had frozen in the ice before reaching the Antarctic shore, and then was crushed during the thaw; they barely managed to get their lifeboats off and head to Elephant Island, at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. And then, that island being uninhabited, and the currents being wrong to make it to Tierra Del Fuego(which looked much closer on the map), a smaller crew had to set out for South Georgia Island, which had a small whaling station.

Then, when they got to South Georgia, they hit a storm before they could find a place to land, and ended up on the wrong side of the island with a wrecked boat. So they had to hike across the island, through uncharted mountains, until they finally reached the station and could, at long last, get help.

Simon didn't take kindly to the IMAX, either. An old-fashioned flash-bulb effect at the beginning of the movie scared him, or something, and he had his hands up to his face the whole time. I don't think he was covering his eyes, or his ears, but he might have been peeking through his fingers, or just trying to reduce his field of vision to keep from being overwhelmed by the huge screen. He didn't do that last time we were there, but then that was probably a year and a half ago. (That film was about "Caves", and I'm pretty sure that I would've been working on The Shadow & The Flame around that time, which would make it November before last.)

For the afternoon and evening, we went over to Nicole's parents' house, which is now much more organized than it was at Easter. They've had more than a few days to unpack, for one thing. Sharna & Nick were there, too. They were quite nice about playing with Simon, which I confess takes a lot of pressure off of me. I just really don't like playing outside that much, when it comes right down to it.

There was an unfortunate incident after supper, though. Nick was taking Simon down into the backyard to play soccer. They went out to the patio and were going down the stairs to the grass. That is, Nick was going down the stairs--Simon had not started down them yet. Suddenly there was a crack and Nick(from our perspective inside)drops out of sight; Sharna grabs Simon.

The stairs broke off the patio. All but a couple of nails attaching it to the patio had vanished, probably because of wood rotting away or something. The stairs fell flat on the ground, and Nick had a bit of rough landing, bruising one foot, but was otherwise unhurt. Simon had, luckily, not been on the stairs. Since then, apparently, Nicole's dad has nailed them suckers up real good. We'll see if Simon is willing to try them again for a while, though.

Later, Nicole's mom dug out a tape she'd made a while ago of some British animated show from PBS called "Simon In The Land of Chalkboard Drawings" or something like that. "My name is Simon and the things I draw come true," went the title song. I found it pretty funny and not a little bit surreal. My favourite was the cartoon where his sister drew a rock musician on Simon's magic blackboard, and the Land of Chalkboard Drawings went to Hell in a handbasket as a result...until Simon replaced the musician's huge amplifier with a much smaller one. Very 60's, it seemed to me, and pretty cool.

Our basement is not quite back to normal yet, but at least it's been pretty much cleaned. The hallway's been mopped, and the last of the towels covering it up have been thrown out. We found the grating to cover the hole, and it's washed and back in place. The library carpet has been steam-cleaned, though there is still some debris on the bookshelves, and some grit on the books themselves. Once we do get that piece of carpet in there, it'll be mostly back to normal. Not this weekend, though, of course.

Swanwick's Bones of The Earth was pretty good, though it almost split into two quasi-independent plotlines for the last half or more of the book. The initial premise--"What if paleontologists were given time travel?"--was pretty neat, but of course you need a plot as well, or you don't really have a novel. That plot got a little fragmented after a while, as I said, but all-in-all it was okay. It will not be my #1 Hugo novel choice, though.

After that I read Lois McMaster Bujold's Cetaganda. I've been trying to read her novels in publication order, rather than chronological, and now I don't know if it was worth it. This one was set after The Vor Game but before most of Borders of Infinity and Brothers In Arms. It was pretty good, almost a Dick Francis-style mystery in some indefinable way(even with no horses...*).

But what I had really wanted was to go on to Memory. That's the book that comes chronologically after Mirror Dance, which was pretty damned good, and so I indulged myself in a way that I rarely do--I read two books by the same author back to back. I just finished Memory, and I enjoyed it immensely. In many ways, the main plot involves our hero, Miles Vorkosigan, trying to figure out what to do with his life he loses, through his own actions, the most significant part of it. The mystery subplot, which doesn't really surface until almost halfway through the book, and leaves 50-60 pages of denouement, is...not quite an afterthought, but it does not dominate the book in the same way that it does in Cetaganda.

I will try to restrain myself from going on to Komarr, though. Hopefully I have been sated for a little while. I really should work on some more library books, this weekend--Lynn Abbey's Thieves' World revival novel, Sanctuary, probably being the next one. Sometimes when I go to visit my mom, I get a lot of reading done, but last time, with Luke making strange, it didn't happen. Let's see how I do this time...

Proceeding, as per schedule, with the countdown:

318. Duran Duran:Careless Memories, from Duran Duran

This is one of Duran Duran's darkest songs, from when they were actually "new wave". I first heard it on the B-side of my brother's single for "Is There Something I Should Know?", and it is still one of the best songs of their early career. (It goes well with the book I just finished, too...)

317. Loose Ends:Hangin' On A String, from So Where Are You?

I don't have this album, but I remember this song fondly from its mid-80's heyday. The harmony vocals, the sweet R&B sound, and the melancholy "relationship-going-wrong" lyrics must make me all nostalgic or something. Solid songcraft here, in any case.

There's too much fire from a perfect match --Jefferson Starship, "Showdown"

2003-05-09T23:34:00.000-06:00

The Hardest Words I Know

It's been an eventful week. "Interesting", as in the Chinese curse.

We've had a house for almost four years now; we've had a car for much longer than that. To be precise, Nicole bought one after moving to Edmonton and before we got married, so about 13 years ago. So I am generally familiar with the phenomenon of "car trouble". It's a pain, an expense, and an inconvenience, but you can deal with it. You might have to take the bus for a few days, maybe even take groceries home in a taxi. But one can handle it.

"House trouble" is a whole other kettle of fish. If something happens to your house, or part of your house, then it impinges on your life more. Belongings might be damaged, for instance. Or, in extreme cases, you have to live somewhere else, which is far more expensive and inconvenient than buses and cabs. If you're just renting, then you can always pass it on to the owner, who can fix their property, but if you're the owner, the buck stops with you.

Earlier this week, I noticed that the car was acting a little strangely. It seemed almost like it had a flat tire, and I stopped it and got out and checked. Nothing. And it stopped before too long.

Then, on Wednesday morning on the way to work, it got absolutely intolerable. It was more than just a flat tire--it was like the whole front of the car was rocking from side to side as I drove. Once again, it stopped after a while, so I kept driving; it started up again when I was very close to work, though. So I bit the bullet and took it in to the Chrysler dealership service department that I've been going to. (I like those better than mechanics', in general.)

Their courtesy van gave me a ride to work, and before the day was through the car was fixed. The left axle assembly had gone out, apparently, but it was an easy fix, and not that pricy, either. I got a ride back with the courtesy van, and drove home only a little later than normal. Anticlimactic. I should have been expecting the other shoe, perhaps.

The downstairs toilet was having some problems flushing, but did not seem to be actually plugged. When the upstairs toilet flushed, I could hear distinct glugging noises in the basement. And, most damning, the wet spot in the basement corridor, right where the little water-drain was. The spot stayed small for a few days, but on Thursday morning it had grown to cover most of the hallway.

A couple of years ago, that patch of carpet had gotten soaked when our water heater sprung a leak. But that was clean water, water suitable for bathing in or boiling your pasta. Not the sewer water that was coming back up the drain.

The sewer people came to take a look at it, and there was a tree root. It had grown into the pipe, in its relentless quest for water underground. The past two years have been pretty dry in Edmonton, so it must have thought it had hit the jackpot. Who knows when it actually got into the system, but the past few weeks have been pretty wet, so now there was enough water to back up. They trimmed the root, but warned that the problem would recur unless we got rid of the tree.

In the meantime, we had a bunch of carpet that was "contaminated" with sewer water. They cut it up with an Exacto-Knife and tossed it into some garbage bags. I'd put some towels down on the carpet; they were now toast as well. It's hard not to be paranoid about anything that comes into contact with any dampness in the basement.

At least it didn't really make it into the library. Though the sewer guys also opened up another drain which was sitting right in front of one of the bookcases(cutting another hole in the carpet), to see if that was also having problems, and there were books sitting on the floor not far away, from my current reshelving efforts... Nicole says they've got some dirt on them now, but as long as they're not wet...

I dragged out the carpet, cut it up some more with the knife, and bagged it up for the garbage last night. I wore an old, very holey sweatshirt, which I had kept around mostly as an emergency backup; after the cuffs got soaked, I threw it out, too. And washed my hands very thoroughly, in the hottest water I could stand.

There are some towels down on the bare basement floor right now, with its uncovered sewer drain; somehow the grating over top of the hole went missing, or got tossed out with the trash as well. We're not impressed with the sewer guys, frankly. The floor still needs to get mopped(our mop is considered expendable, too); it's not wet, but it's doubtless covered with a layer of germs right now. And then we can try to replace the carpet, find some scraps somewhere. We're reconciled to the fact that the carpets in the basement will all have to be replaced when we sell the house anyway, so as far as I'm concerned we can just grab anything the right shape and plop it down.

The tree's days are numbered, of course. Maybe we're not going to spring for the $200 to get it cut down right now. We're not even precisely sure which tree's roots are at fault--there's a tree in out front yard, and one in the neighbour's front yard, and one in our back yard--but it's probably the one in front of our house. The tree-removal guy checked and said its an elm, which means that it has to be treated differently because of the risk of Dutch Elm Disease. I'm pretty sure we don't have any in Edmonton, or Alberta, or something, and they're trying to keep it out.

It's a pity, because I do like trees, but not enough to risk my books getting soaked in a layer of sludge. Let's face it, I like books better than trees. It would be neat if we could actually convert our tree into books, but I suspect that would be much more expensive to arrange.

I did read Black Unicorn, and pretty quickly, too, but then it's a young-adult novel and less than 200 pages long. It's interesting, because Tanith Lee does make a conscious effort to write for her audience here, so it's not as dense as some of her standard fare. But she still manages to add her unique flavour to what might otherwise be a cliched story of a bored teenage girl trying to figure out where she fits into the world. There's two more books in the series, which I'm sure I will be checking out soon.

Now I'm back into the library books; I started Swanwick's Bones of The Earth, which had an utterly compelling first chapter, but slowed down a bit after that. We picked up more today, too--Cory Doctorow's Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I am practically going to be reading nothing but library books this month, and will still be lucky to get them all done.

I will still read some non-library books, though. And then there's all the nonfiction ones, too. Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine came in at the library, too, and Darren had lent me a couple of books a month or so ago. I've started one of them, Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, which fits right in with the books I've been reading recently about science vs. pseudoscience. It's even made an explicit reference to How We Know What Ain't So, the most impressive so far. This one feels a bit too much like preaching to the choir, though. But maybe somebody has read the book and changed their mind about pseudoscience...

The other one of Darren's is The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, And Phosphorus, by John Emsley. I'm pretty sure that this, and the Sagan as well, were bought with the Professional Development budget he had at his last position, teaching Chemistry at Red Deer College. It does sound very interesting, but I still picked up the Sagan first.

I had promised myself at some point that this month I would start on my mammoth Wheel of Time indexing project. What I want to do, you see, is go through it chapter by chapter, and note which characters appear in each chapter, and what they are doing. At the moment I have a list of character names, brief descriptions, and a few page references. I want longer descriptions, and tracking characters over time. So, yes, rereading the whole series...again. Maybe I'll get this done in time for the eleventh book to come out. I still haven't decided whether to start at the beginning, or jump around--I still haven't gone through A Crown of Swords on my first pass of name-collecting, for instance, or, of course, Crossroads of Twilight. And there are more characters to follow in later books... But I really should still start at the beginning.

I put my list of blog bookmarks into Blogrolling recently, and it seems that I just keep having to remove blogs from the list, because they keep going away.

TranceJen's journal on Diaryland is the most recent casualty(that I'm aware of--I haven't checked any of them in a few days). She didn't give many details, but it sounds like someone was stalking her or something. She pulled her journal, and deleted all her archives. I only managed to read her farewell page in a Google cache--which makes me wonder if one can get those deleted as well, since otherwise it's pretty meaningless to delete anything on the Web. I've been following her almost from the beginning, and in the last month things have taken such a dramatic upturn in her life that I start to well up every time I think of it. I mean, she thought she was on a downward spiral of deterioration into Multiple Sclerosis, and then, after finally visiting the right doctor, she was fully recovered, and in fact better than she had been for years. And then some asshole out there on the Net has to ruin that for her... I hope it all works out and she is able to return again, but if not, I wish her the best of luck with her life.

One of my first blog links, as I recall, was to "The Sex Pistols Are Alive And Well And Living In Sohatsenago". This was the journal of Acanit(not her real name, of course), an Iranian woman living in the U.S. She described her trip to Africa, which was pretty traumatic, as well as her own medical nightmares, and was just starting to come to terms with her life when she decided to pull the plug on her journal. She did a pretty thorough job of wiping it out from the Web, so I guess it is possible...though it's one of those things where I wish I had been able to mirror it for myself first, because she had some fantastic writing, and sometimes harrowing events.

More prosaically, Quincunx has decided to stop his blog, "'twixt joy and sorrow", and concentrate on his other idiosyncratic web projects. I've had similar impulses, I have to say, especially over the past few months' drought of postings, but I still feel some level of obligation. To finish my countdown, if nothing else.* He does still have some interesting stuff on his site, but no blog any more.

Of course, there are always blogs that I just stop reading, because they grow too strident, or too dull, or too racy. And it's not like I've been keeping up with even the shortened list that I have up now... Well, if I get the urge, I read them, otherwise I don't. It's not a compulsion any more, like it might have been at some point. Sometimes it seems like if something's not a compulsion, I just don't do it.

My current compulsion is still Civilization II. I started up a new game, I think last weekend. I was still working my way through Civ II's new civilizations--yes, I have played less than seven games of it since I bought it however long ago. Before we bought our house, at the very least. I'm playing the Spanish, and I'm using a neat map that I downloaded from Civfanatics, which is drawn to look like a demon. It's very land-rich, and I started out the game following the Expansionist strategy, of basically building as many cities as I could, so of course I am kicking butt. I'm only playing at Warlord level, though. I had finally worked my up to being able to win at Emperor level in Civ 1, but now that the Despotic Conquest strategy doesn't work any more...

But that's what I've been doing with almost all my spare time this week.

Counting the continue down:

320. Thomas Dolby: I Love You Goodbye, from Astronauts & Heretics

I haven't gotten into the rest of this album yet, but this opening track is wonderful. It's very musically rich, with lots of different sounds in it, and a good steady beat throughout. The lyrics start out weird and funny, but by the end they build up an extraordinary power.

319. Danielle Dax: Pariah, from Dark Adapted Eye

I've never been quite sure what she's talking about in this song--the verses she does in a not-very-clear high-pitched voice, and then the choruses drop an octave or more, and are still not completely intelligible. But there's a clear sense of menace in the music, as well as an attractive Eastern flavour, so I'm willing to let that slide.

Chipmunks roasting on an open fire...

2003-05-05T22:38:00.000-06:00

Writing The Lines As They Come To Me

I went to Home Depot after work today, found the brackets we needed no problem(and ones with real screws, not flimsy nail ones like Simon's), so Luke now has a shade up in his room. Here's hoping that leads to more sleep time for us...

I am once again far behind on my library CD mini-reviews. They did a big changeover of the database system at the library, so a lot of stuff ended up due on May 3rd, after the new system went in. I'm not completely sold on the new system yet, since it's lacking a few features that the old one had, though it does have some new ones as well.

Anyway, here are the CDs:

Indigo Girls:Become You: It's been a while--"Rites of Passage", or four albums ago by now--since the Indigo Girls did any really great songs. Their last one, "Come On Now Social", I haven't even bought, and I doubt I will unless I happen across it for $1 or something. This one also falls into that category, sadly. It used to be that Emily Saliers's songs were melodic and often gentle, and Amy Ray's were harder-edged and often powerful. When the two came together it worked best. But now they are both melodic and neither of them is powerful. Only "Bitterroot" evoked some of Amy Ray's old power, and none of the gentler songs evoked the emotion of "Galileo" or "Virginia Woolf" or "Prince of Darkness". I guess they've settled down a bit too far.

Philip Glass:1000 Airplanes On The Roof: I don't mind a bit of Philip Glass on occasion, but this didn't seem to add anything new, that he hadn't done on "Songs From Liquid Days" or "Glassworks". Apparently there was supposed to be some sort of science-fictional storyline behind this, as part of some multimedia performance art or something, but if any of that was lyrical it was left out of this edition. So it didn't do much for me.

Lenny Kravitz:Lenny: I don't mind Lenny Kravitz in general, and I confess I'm amazed that after his middling debut on "Let Love Rule" fourteen years ago, he's still around. This album was okay, listenable, but not something I will want to add to my collection. "You Were In My Heart" was my favourite track, a little bit funkier than most of the rest of the album.

Chris Knight:A Pretty Good Guy: This guy's filed in Country, so I suspect that I only checked him out because of a Robert Christgau recommendation. Those have bombed out in the past, but this album was definitely worth a listen. Chris Knight is not your Garth Brooks/Alan Jackson kind of country, but closer to Steve Earle in many ways, especially on tracks like the standout "Oil Patch Town". The title track was pretty good, too. Maybe not a wishlist item, but I'd be just as willing to buy it for $1...

India.Arie:Voyage To India: Never since Erykah Badu have I come across such an overrated new artist. I tried, I really did, but I could not find a single track from this album that stood out at all. I guess it'll take more than an interesting name to make her produce any music worth listening to.

The Kim Band:Girlology: This Canadian band is fronted by Kim Bingham, whom I might have heard of before, but I wasn't sure. The album was alternative rock, and beyond that its sound has mostly faded from my memory. "Brickhead" was the most memorable track, being a little more funky, and funky is what I like. Hmmm...from checking her website, I note that she used to be in "Montreal ska phenomenon" Me, Mom & Morgentaler. I have their "Shiva Space Machine" album, and it's...interesting. What can you say about an album whose most memorable song is a singalong called "Everybody's Got AIDS"?

Mick Jagger:Goddess In The Doorway: I wasn't expecting much from this album, since I'm only occasionally a Jagger or Stones fan, but I actually really liked it, and it should go on my wishlist sometime. Mick has gone into techno-inspired territory, like Madonna did on "Ray of Light", and for the most part it works really well. The title track and "Visions of Paradise" are the standout tracks. There were one or two songs that sounded like he should have let someone else sing them, because his voice was a bit jarring--"Hide Away" in particular. But on the whole it's a great album.

Jeremiah Freed: This is mostly just teen angst-rock, in the style of Creed et al. Credits for an interesting name, but that doesn't necessarily improve the music. Best moments come at the very beginning of the album, on the song "Stranded", where they start with a single guitar and voice, the rest of the guitars not coming in until two minutes into the song. Unfortunately the relentless crunching guitars stayed there for the rest of the album.

David Wilcox:Rhythm of Love: This is the Canadian rocker David Wilcox, of "Layin' Pipe" and "The Natural Edge", rather than the American folk musician. He swung through pop territory in the late 80's, but here he's back to a bluesier kind of rock, which I don't like as much. "Hook It Boy" was a bit interesting sonically, but the rest of the album didn't stand out for me.

Alicia Keys:Songs In A Minor: Well, I liked this album better than India.Arie's, but I guess it still isn't my thing. I still like the single "Fallin'", but the rest of it didn't stick with me.

Field Day:Dawn of A New Day: This is that punk/emo stuff that I don't like, and that's all I can really say about it. At least it was short.

Type O Negative:Bloody Kisses: I had some trepidation about this album, but it wasn't the death-metal I was expecting. It's metal, for sure, but not overpowering, so fairly listenable. They gave an indefinable impression of having fun with the whole metal genre thing, though not in any overt way. They weren't over the top, but they were certainly peeking up at it. Much more fun than I thought it would be, and I will try to check them out again.

Hooverphonic:Blue Wonder Power Milk: This was definitely a good album, probably wishlist caliber, though maybe not up to the level of "The Magnificent Tree". There didn't seem to be as many standout tracks, at least, but their alt-lounge kind of sound was still there. "Lung" was the song that most struck me.

Christina Aguilera:Stripped: Maybe this isn't any kind of creative breakthrough for her, since Linda Perry did a lot of the songwriting, but it's still far, far better than her first album. "Beautiful" was a great song, as were "Fighter" and "Make Over". Now I'm not sure whether it's her or Britney on top...

Steve Miller Band:Greatest Hits 1974-1978: I am mostly familiar with the "Abracadabra" Steve Miller, or maybe "I Want To Make The World Turn Around"(which is still my favourite of his), but I was curious about his earlier stuff. I've heard so much about "The Joker" and "Fly Like An Eagle"... Well, it turns out that those two tracks were disappointments, as was most of the album, but I didn't mind "Rock'n Me". It's one of those songs I heard all the time but didn't know who did it, so now I know, at least.

The Pursuit of Happiness:Sex & Food: Greatest Hits: I still tend to like their first album best, but The Pursuit of Happiness had five pretty decent albums nonetheless. This album is a great retrospective of their career, complete with liner notes by lead singer Moe Berg, and several bonus tracks as well. Out of those, the best are "Wake Up And Smell Cathy" and "Take You With Me". It's weird hearing Berg talk about Todd Rundgren, who produced their first album, and his "daughter" Liv--who later, of course, discovered that her father was actually Steven Tyler.

Labour of Love--The Music of Nick Lowe: Nick Lowe is one of those albums I have heard more about than I have heard. I mostly associate him with songs like "I Knew The Bride"(which I am entirely sick of--every wedding I went to for about ten years played that song), and "Teacher Teacher". But I ran across his version of "Cruel To Be Kind", which I was sure I had heard before. This album is of course cover versions, but, without having heard the originals, I still liked some of the songs; Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers' "Cracking Up" and Marshall Crenshaw's "Television" are both good. Some of the other artists were too folky or bluesy for me, but oddly enough I liked Sleepy LaBeef & C.J. Chenier's version of "Half A Boy & Half A Man".

Look At The Sunshine: This was one of the series of compilation albums intended to cover territory that the "Nuggets" series didn't--British pop of the 60's. On this volume, they covered mostly British bands recording in the vocal harmony style of the Beach Boys et al. Mostly bands I'd never heard of, of course(there was The Knack, but I think it was different from the "My Sharona" group). Interesting, but didn't strike my fancy.

Sea Level:The Best of Sea Level: I didn't know anything about this band when I picked up the CD; now I know that it was formed by some former members of the Allman Brothers Band. There's a band I have no urge to check out...and I didn't get much out of this one. Late 70's rock-jazz fusion, doesn't do much for me.

I also picked up a few library booksale CDs...

Fred Eaglesmith:50-Odd Dollars: I always get Eaglesmith confused with Ron Sexsmith, and Darren has been trying to get me to listen to him for years. So I picked this one up, and it's pretty damn good. The sound reminds me of Greg Garing's "Lost", dark rock tinged with blues, folk, and electronic at the same time. Interesting note: Eaglesmith co-wrote several songs on the Chris Knight album mentioned above. Also, this album was produced by Scott Merritt, whose 1986 album "Gravity Is Mutual" is a favourite of mine.

Kurt Weill:The Threepenny Opera: I was mostly just curious about this, I guess. I don't know if I'll actually keep this CD, or listen to it that often if I do. It's all in German, of course, and not always that well-sung. And, let's face it, "Mack The Knife" is not on here, not in the form that was popular in the English-speaking world. Maybe this is due for an English version one of these years...

I also have a Rollins Band one that I haven't listened to yet.

Still with me? Well, now it's on to some books. Last I left you, I was reading the Universe 8 anthology. That was, of course, a bit uneven, but it had some good stories on it. Low point may have been the Michael Cassutt story "Hunting", whose plot was buried a little too deeply for my tastes. The high point was, of course, R.A. Lafferty's contribution, which may have been why I bought the book in the first place. Lafferty is(was?)a genius of the bizarre SF short story, and this one was no different. "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies" was a humorous mock-factual account of a series of very early television broadcasts, inextricably intertwined with the drama going on behind the scenes.

Greg Bear's story "Scattershot" was interesting, but its ending came a bit too quickly--maybe it would work better as a novel. (For all I know, he's already done it...) Cynthia Felice's "David & Lindy" was spoiled a bit by Terry Carr's introduction, but was still an interesting examination of friendship and self-sacrifice when one telepath is in a coma and his best friend tries to decide if he's willing to pay the price to help him... Gordon Eklund's "Vermeer's Window" was very detached, about a rich boy who has Vermeer's personality implanted inside him and ends up reproducing all his paintings, but doesn't know why he's painting them.

After that I went quickly through Cherylyn Stacey's I'll Tell You Tuesday If I Last That Long. It's a young-adult book published by Tree Frog Press, the small press that did two of Nicole's early books. I seem to think she might have gotten it from them as a free sample or something, but I'm not sure. In any case, it's not bad for a book with a fourteen-year-old female protagonist. She matures a lot over the course of the book, and doesn't annoy me the way younger protagonists often do.

I just finished Dennis McKiernan's The Dark Tide. He's one of a few authors where I never can find a starting point to read in bookstores, new or used, so finally I got around to checking out the library. It's weird to think that when this book came out, twenty years ago or so, fantasy was not the publishing phenomenon that it is today. Anyway, while it has some very Tolkien-ripoff moments, it manages to acquire its own unique voice and storyline nonetheless. I may yet check out more book in this series.

Next is probably Tanith Lee's Black Unicorn, first in one of her trilogies. I have a wack(sp?) of library books piling up on me this month. There's Lynn Abbey's Sanctuary, which looks to be the start of resurrecting the old Thieves' World series. Then there's Kim Stanley Robinson's Days of Rice And Salt, and Michael Swanwick's Bones of The Earth, two of the Hugo nominees for best novel. We've read two of them already, and we're still waiting for the fifth one, China Miéville's The Scar--even though neither of us got very far into his Perdido Street Station. And Nicole picked up Stephen R. Donaldson's The Man Who Killed His Brother, the first book in a mystery series originally published under the pseudonym "Reed Stephens". Nicole's read three other books in the series, but the first one's just been reissued, I guess. So I might try that one, too.

I also bought War And Peace. When I saw it on the booksale table I couldn't resist. It doesn't look actually that much longer than Les Misérables, and I finished that one... So one day I will actually take the challenge, and read the book. I will be known as "the guy who actually read War And Peace". I will be a man of wealth and mystery! ...But not just yet.


C U T O N

 O N D W

322. The Bangles: Return Post, from Different Light

This is a nice bluesy song, Vicki(?) Peterson on the vocals, and the trademark harmonies in the chorus, about a long-distance relationship in trouble. A classic.

321. Tears For Fears: Memories Fade, from The Hurting

"Songs From The Big Chair" was Tears For Fears' crowning achievement, but their first album had some decent tracks too, like this one. It reminds me of Debbie Gibson's "Foolish Beat", another story of a teenager who wonders if they will ever love again. Ah, youth, and its lack of perspective... Still, Roland Orzabal brings a convincing amount of emotion to the lyrics, and the musical backing is strong as well.

Sorry, it just sort of hit me like a two-ton...um...heavy thing.

2003-05-04T23:04:00.000-06:00

Words Are Very Unnecessary

Luke is sleeping in Simon's room tonight. In the travel crib/playpen that we got from my friend Louisa after Simon was born. (And how do I repay her? By losing touch entirely. Ah, me. So hard to stay in contact...and so hard to reinitiate contact after so long a silence. But I digress.)

See, Luke has been waking up earlier and earlier these days, and we concluded that it's probably because, with spring, the sun is rising earlier. Our latitude means that days get longer faster, you see. We had the same problem with Simon at one point, so we put in an opaque shade in his room instead of the leaky Venetian blinds. We still had Venetians in Luke's room, with a blanket hung over it to increase its opacity, but evidently it's not enough.

I hate putting up blinds. With a passion. I am not a handy person at the best of times, though I can put together a bookshelf or Ikea furniture. It's trying to use a screwdriver on something two feet above my head while standing on a chair that I find really wearing. Several years ago, when we moved into a basement apartment, after a long day of moving boxes and furniture, we had to put up blinds on our bedroom window because outside it there was a parking lot. That was awful.

Simon's blind we bought from Zellers(a Canadian chain roughly equivalent to Wal-Mart), with little brackets that nailed in. At the time I thought this was a good idea, because, not having an appropriate power tool, I found it very hard to put screws into the wall where there were no existing holes. Especially standing on a chair, etc. However, the nails are just not as secure.

It has fallen down a few times, too, but then some of that may be attributed to my attempts to raise it back up in the morning. I have never had an easy time with those roll-up shades, where you pull them down to pull them down(of course), and also pull them down to raise them up again. I can never manage to give it that little tug that loosens whatever spring-loaded thing in the mechanism brings it back up. Maybe at some point in my childhood I could manage it, but I remember pulling blinds down a fair way as a child in my grandparents' house, before asking someone else to do it.

So with Simon's, I did once end up unrolling the entire thing, all the way down to the metal bar in the middle, and one of the brackets was terminally loose by that point. So I have decided that I will just not try anymore. I have given up. This is not a skill I possess(any longer, if I once had it), and I am reconciled to it.

So anyway, when buying Luke's blind, we could not find the matching brackets. We picked out some other brackets that we thought might work, but when we actually tried to put it up this evening, we concluded that they would not work. The shade would be very precarious, and the little spring-loaded winding mechanism just would not trigger. This was, of course, several minutes after Home Depot closed for the night, and I didn't think that much else would be open later. I had already taken down the old blind when we made this determination, too, and I was vigorously opposed to putting the damn thing back up just to take it down again, even through the screw holes were already there.

Hence, Luke is sleeping in Simon's room, which has a bloody proper shade in it. The playpen fits with a few inches to spare in the entrance to Simon's room, so we won't be able to close Simon's door. We had better remember to close Luke's, so that the unobstructed sunlight doesn't sneak around the corner and wake him up at sunrise anyway. And Simon better not wake Luke up in the middle of the night. Normally Simon sleeps pretty soundly, if he's not sick, and in fact sleeps pretty late these days, sometimes until almost 9:00. So hopefully it's more likely to be the other way around.

We managed to catch a few movies this week. Actually, one of them I went out on my own, because we hadn't managed our mutual movie date this month, so Nicole let me go by myself. I went to see "Daredevil", which was something she wasn't that interested in anyway.

I never really read the comic book, but I knew of the character and his abilities, from "The Official Handbook of The Marvel Universe", as well as his guest appearances in "The Defenders". I also knew of Elektra, mostly from Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz's stunning 8-issue miniseries, which is still one of my favourites.

Anyway, the movie had the combination of goofy humour and melodrama that seems to be the hallmark of comic-book movies, and probably the comics themselves, if I were honest. I did catch a few in-jokes, like the boxer named "John Romita", and the forensics guy named "Jack Kirby", though I missed Stan Lee's cameo. Colin Farrell did a bang-up job as the Irish psycho Bullseye, and it's really a pity that he won't be back for any sequels. (I didn't know he was in the movie--he's a busy guy these days...) It was also nice to see Jon Favreau, one of my favourite "Friends" guest stars, in a decent role. I heard he's directing these days...

All in all, though, it's not a movie that I'm sorry I waited to see. It was probably worth cheap-theatre prices, but it was no "Spider-Man" or "X-Men".

We also rented a couple. "Red Dragon" was something that we had missed in theatres, but we were eager to see anyway. I'd just read the book a few months ago, and Nicole had reread it recently as well. It was pretty faithful to the book, and most of the changes, most notably an extra scene showing Hannibal Lecter's actual capture, were for the better. Emily Watson was great as the blind girl, Ralph Fiennes did a good killer, and I'm becoming a really big fan of Edward Norton, since "Fight Club". Mary Louise Parker, with whom we've become much more familiar(for a long time we got her confused with Catherine Mary Stewart and Mary Stuart Masterson)after her stint on "The West Wing", did a fair job with her role as well. Anthony Hopkins...well, he was good, I suppose, but I couldn't help but think how much older Hannibal Lecter looked than he did in "Silence of The Lambs", which is set later...

For the other movie, we wanted an older movie(=longer rental), and something a bit more G-rated so we could watch it during the day with Simon around. We ended up with "The Rookie". Now, I'm not a big baseball fan, but I know the basics of the sport; it sounded interesting from the previews, anyway, so we took a chance. It was a slow starter, and as far as I'm concerned they wouldn't have lost that much if they'd just started off in the present timeline. But no, they went into the history of the town he was living in, and his childhood, when we could probably have gotten the necessary information about his troubled relationship with his father and the like in context. But it wasn't too bad, and Simon seemed to stay interested.

I thought it was interesting, looking the actors up later, to discover that Brian Cox, who played Dennis Quaid's father in "The Rookie", played "Hannibal Lecktor"[sic?] in "Manhunter", which was the original filming of..."Red Dragon". (He's also apparently the villain in the new X-Men movie...) Oh, and Rachel Griffiths, who I first saw in "Muriel's Wedding", and was Quaid's wife in "The Rookie", was in "Hilary & Jackie" with Emily Watson, from "Red Dragon". That's a few more links than I expect from two seemingly unrelated movies...but maybe you could find it with anything. If people send me in movies--not pairs, just single movies--I'll try to pick a pair of them and see what weird links I can find.

And speaking(as I did earlier)of "The West Wing", after Matthew Perry's recent guest appearances, I can't help but wonder if he's angling to join the cast on a permanent basis. If this is, in fact, the final season of "Friends", which I am beginning to doubt. They keep introducing new plot threads that I can't imagine them resolving in only a few more episodes.

It's hard to watch Matthew Perry, without expecting him to be Chandler. In the first episode, he was being interviewed for the position vacated by Ainsley Hayes(when she moved to that Miami show), and I kept flashing to the "Friends" episode where Chandler was trying to tone down his personality for a job interview. In the second episode, he did get to exchange some wittier dialogue with C.J., so maybe he will eventually be able to establish an independent character. But it will be hard for him if he does stay on.

Continuing on again further once more with the countdown:

324. The Cure: Lullaby, from Disintegration

This song, with its refrain of "The spider-man is having me for dinner tonight", always strikes me as funny. With a strings-based background, it's a little easier on the ears than some Cure songs, too. I do have trouble figuring out what Robert Smith is singing most of the time, since it's all in a half-whisper.

323. Depeche Mode: Enjoy The Silence, from Violator

A song from the more sensitive side of Depeche Mode, from my favourite of their albums. It kind of grew on me after its first release, when I wasn't that keen on it, possibly because of the silly video.

She's been married so many times she's got rice marks all over her face... --Tom Waits, "Better Off Without A Wife"

2003-04-29T19:55:00.000-06:00

My Thoughts Are Miles Away

Something disturbing happened to me last week. Well, initially it seemed disturbing, and then it seemed innocuous, and now it's starting to bother me again.

I was heading south on 109th Street, on my usual route home from work. The traffic wasn't creeping along as it sometimes does, but I still ended up having to stop at a red light for almost every intersection.

At Jasper Avenue, I was second, or maybe third, in line. As I was slowing down, I noticed some kids, pretty disreputable looking, high school to junior high age. They had been standing on the corner, but as the lights turned red and the traffic stopped, they stepped out into the street and wove among the cars. I'm used to jaywalking in that area, but more often it's half a block north, and let's face it, they were right at the corner anyway.

One of the kids, who had a sort of short mohawk hairdo, and probably some quantity of Native blood, came close to my car. He raised a T-shaped object in his hand, and for half a second I thought, He's going to smash my window.

But he didn't. He washed my window with the squeegee he had in his hand. My window wasn't that dirty, but he washed it anyway, and then he moved on to the next car. No tapping on the window for money, or anything like that. He didn't even try to get any acknowledgement from me. In fact, I vaguely remember something like the same thing happening last year, or the year before, though I had forgotten it until then.

I was immensely relieved, and it seemed funny after that. How I had reacted, to something so innocuous! This is Edmonton, not L.A. or Toronto or anything--kids are not going to be smashing windows in downtown rush hour traffic. But that was my first assumption. My knee-jerk reaction was fear.

I try very hard to be open-minded. I consider myself to be, if not unbiased, at least tolerant and fair-minded. But apparently I've still got prejudices lurking in there. Not really racial prejudices, though it'd probably be fair to say that Natives can make me uncomfortable. But if I see a group of three or four teenage boys, dressed in what is probably typical teen fashion, I tense up. I am prepared in case they try something. Admittedly, I am mostly "prepared" in the sense that I am running through scenarios in my head in which I react with heroism, inspiration, and ability against my evil teenage oppressors, none of which are likely to happen, but some part of my mind is nonetheless expecting that kind of behaviour. And it has never, ever come.

Maybe it's all those books and movies, where the nice guy who just wants to be left alone is set upon by a nasty bigger guy, and his two or three cronies, who hold the nice guy while the nasty guy punches him up. I remember a scene from the John Stith book Reunion On Neverend, not to mention "Back To The Future", and that kind of stuff. I'm sure I encountered similar situations, never actually getting up but certainly getting harassed, when I was a kid, two years younger than the rest of my class but still apparently more intelligent.

I'd like to know how the heck those kids got into the window washing, though. I bet there's a neat story behind it.

Time to cover a couple of library CDs...

White Town: Women In Technology In 1997, MuchMusic played White Town's "Your Woman" nearly to death. I'm not sure whether they loved the video or the song, but Nicole, for one, got sick of it. It never bothered me that much, and I still think it's an okay song. It took until now for me to check out the album, though. I'd have to say that that track is definitely the most interesting. The rest is very strongly, and admittedly, influenced by 80's synth-pop--the band consists mainly of Jyoti Mishra, with a couple of guests. The only other track that I really liked was "Wanted", which was co-written by Ann Pearson, the guest vocalist who showed up on a few other tracks as well. The other songs didn't hold together, and just weren't as sonically interesting as "Your Woman" was.

I did end up checking out the web site, which led me to Jyoti's actual web site. I found him a bit stridently anti-war, so I didn't spend much time there, but I did check out his "Heroes" page, which led me to be curious about Susan Blackmore. This is getting far afield from music, but what the hell.

Turns out that Ms. Blackmore was one of the leading researchers into out-of-body experiences, and a number of other parapsychological phenomena, but her scientific mind managed to eventually conclude that the whole set of things was just bunk. She basically just divorced herself from the whole field, which I think is pretty courageous. She also wrote a book called The Meme Machine, on a topic(memes, of course), which was dear to my heart; they have the book at the library, and hopefully I'll get to read it soon. She's also written a textbook about various theories of human consciousness--not proposing any one theory over any other, but trying to assess them all impartially. That sounds interesting too, and I'll have to look for that.

Wave: State of Mind Wave is a youthful male duo along the lines of, say, Sky, or Savage Garden. I liked the song "That's How It Feels" that was playing on the radio, and the rest of the album is quite listenable, but not outstanding. "Save A Little Part", and the title track, are also catchy songs.

Bruce Cockburn: Circles In The Stream This turned out to be a live album, from 1977. Most of my favourite Bruce Cockburn songs come after that time, but this was a good listen anyway. I like live albums because they shake up the sequence of the albums, and put songs in new contexts where sometimes I will notice them a little better. For instance, I was quite taken by the song "Arrows of Light", which is on an album I already had, and had never been struck by before.

Gillian Welch: Time(The Revelator) A ho-hum album of roots & folk, with minimalist sound that just doesn't much appeal to me. Sorry, Gillian.

Whizzing ever onward and upward, further up and further in, through the countdown:

326. Ann Mortifee: Gypsy Born, from Journey To Kairos

I listened to a lot of Ann Mortifee as a kid, and this was my favourite of her albums. Her voice almost whispers in the verses, but soars in the chorus, as it tells the story of a girl who yearns for something outside of her narrow life, and finds it in the stories of an old pedlar.

325. A-Ha: Soft Rains of April, from Scoundrel Days

This song, about a man languishing in prison and missing his home, is gentle and understated until Morten Harket's voice soars up into the bridge with power he displays far too seldom.

The lazy dog jumps over the quick brown fox.

2003-04-28T22:08:00.000-06:00

It's Raining But I'm Not Complaining

Madonna's latest album has, of course, been accompanied by a whole media frenzy, starting of course with the controversial "American Life" video, which might practically have been engineered for the publicity. And then there was the "Will & Grace" episode, whose timing would unquestionably have been arranged.

This doesn't bother me that much. That's Madonna for you. I hear that the album is sub-par, but then I hear that there are some people who still like it. And hey, at least it has "Die Another Day" on it, so there's one good song already. I think I've got most of Madonna's albums to date, with the exception of soundtracks("I'm Breathless" does not tempt me)and the like. "Music" I haven't sprung for yet--it didn't do much for me, besides the title track, but one day I'm sure I will get a copy.

What does bother me, though, is how, in headlines, she is constantly referred to as "Material Girl". This can't be for short, the way one might use "J-Lo" or "Jacko", because, as I'm sure you've noticed, it's longer than Madonna. So why do they use it? Just to try to be clever? To belittle her, perhaps?

Grow up, people. She made one song called "Material Girl", about eighteen years ago, and she didn't even write the thing, and while it may have been one of her biggest hits at one time, it's ancient history now. There are doubtless thousands of people blogging who weren't alive when that song came out. Can we get over it, please? Even if it was an accurate statement of her attitudes at the time, and not just a calculated image assumption(not Madonna!), I doubt that it holds true any more, especially given what I've heard about "American Life".

I've seen a few people refer to her as "Madge", and frankly, I like that better.

But then, I suppose I shouldn't start to expect creativity to come out of entertainment headline writers yet. I sometimes think that they give these people lists of cliches, organized by key words, so that if they're doing an article on Jennifer Love Hewitt, they can find something with "Love" in it, or something with "Wing" or "West" for "The West Wing", etc. I'm sure there's huge quantities of new phrases being coined out there right now, but they're not making it into the entertainment news, I guess...

Remember back when I got my new hard drive? About four posts ago?* Well, it seems to still be working fine. I even figured out, eventually, what "happened" to the /usr/bin files in Cygwin. Apparently Cygwin mounts /bin and /usr/bin at the same place, so that the D:\cygwin\usr\bin directory is actually empty, but you see a mirror of the D:\cygwin\bin directory. I've been reading the cygwin mailing list for a few weeks now, because I'm using this stuff at work, and it's been a real education.

But that wasn't what I wanted to talk about. When I was driving back from the computer store, I turned on the radio, and ended up on CJSR. And what they were playing just floored me.

It was barely music. It was spoken, in a woman's voice. Two voices, really, but obviously still the same woman. One voice had a Southern accent, and was carrying on a one-sided fight with her lover(or his--I'm not sure whether it was intended to be a man or not, but the lover was definitely female). The other voice had a more neutral(American)accent and kept giving instructions, as if through an earphone, to manipulate ordinary objects, which were wired with high-tech capabilities, always "casually". It was spellbinding.

Luckily, I managed to catch the name of the artist, and the title of the track--Miranda July, "Co-Star". I checked it at the library later, and, of course, it wasn't there. But I did find evidence of her existence on the net. And, I confess with some shame, it was the first thing I looked for when I signed up on Kazaa. I'm sure I will eventually try to order one of her albums, but I really want to listen to that one track again. It was magnificent.

What have I been reading in the last little while? I finished rereading Dare by Philip Jose Farmer, and let me say that it was almost a completely pointless book, discarding characters and plot threads with reckless abandon and finishing ultimately unsatisfyingly. Either it should have been a longer book, to more fully explore these things, or it should have tossed some of the junk out to focus more on one thing. But that's not really Farmer's style, I guess.

Then I read Ian Fleming's From Russia, With Love. Yes, I've been trying to read the original James Bond books. The first three I thought were pretty good, but the last one, Diamonds Are Forever was sub-par, and this one wasn't that great either. The movie followed it almost slavishly, so I guess I knew what was coming most of the time. James Bond didn't appear until a third of the way into the book, the preceding parts being all about the Russian intelligence officers who were trying to figure out some way to regain their lost prestige, and eventually hit on an elaborate, nay, overelaborate, plan involving Bond.

The problem was, while the plan was being executed, I was not convinced that the good guys were being quite as stupid as they were, or short-sighted. In short, I wasn't convinced that it would have worked. Fleming tried a little bit too hard. The book also ends, unlike the movie, with Bond dying, apparently, from Rosa Klebb's poisoned boot-spike. Was Fleming trying to finish the series there, like Doyle killing off Holmes? Very possible.

After that, I went on to Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast. This is the second book in Robinson's thematic "Orange County" trilogy. The first, The Wild Shore, took place in OC in a future where the U.S. was being completely oppressed by the U.N. and had been rendered virtually powerless, with people living near-pastoral lives. The third(which I mistaken read next, thinking it was the second), The Pacific Edge, was in a sort of libertarian utopia, with the plot centered almost entirely on interpersonal interaction--people fell in love, and people with differing goals came into conflict. Both were pretty good, though very different from your average SF plot, more like mainstream, except set in a recognizably different world.

This one was set in the "middle ground", the more realistic(though still unlikely, of course)extrapolation of current trends. Orange County is built up with an entire upper level of freeways, malls, and condos, and there is still, in 2040, a Cold War going on. Our main character is living his life a little aimlessly, searching for purpose and love. His father is working for a defense contractor, and his friends are engaged in such things as drug dealing(though pointedly not seedy drugs here--mind-altering rather than narcotic), industrial sabotage, and living in the niches of the system. His life swings high, and it swings low, and the climax is very powerful. It's heady stuff, once you get into it, and might even make this year's Top Reads list. (Where's last year's list? I'm still workin' on it.)

Now I've started Universe 8, one of Terry Carr's SF anthology series from the 70's. Short-story books are almost always harder than novels, especially multiple-author ones, because you lose momentum with each story, and, let's face it, the authors vary in skill, too. I've read many short stories by people whose novels I would not buy. The first one, Michael Bishop's "Old Folks At Home", is a bit on the long side, but it's an interesting look at a possible future as it pertains to the elderly, as opposed to the young or mature adult.

Why am I reading it? Well, to be honest, it is, as far as my records can tell, the book that I bought the longest ago and still haven't read. I've been keeping a list of my books for many, many years, though it didn't include dates until about 11 years ago. This book is probably one I bought in 1990 or '91. I've given up on the strategy I had for a while, of only reading books in the order I bought them, but I am trying to make some progress on these relics from a distant past. I don't always like them, but hey, there might be a good story or too in here...

Now it is the time for the counting down to be taking place!

328. Ginger: Solid Ground, from Far Out

The Grapes of Wrath was one of the great Canadian bands of the late 80's, but in the 90's one of the mainstays of the band left, and the rest continued at Ginger. They were pretty good, if not always as good as the Grapes. This song, from their first full-length album, is pretty good, with music reminiscent of some of the more psychedelic elements of the last Grapes album, "These Days", and Tom Hooper's vocals going from murmur to impassioned cry.

327. Depeche Mode: But Not Tonight, from Black Celebration

This song has great associations for me, bringing to mind all sorts of late-night excursions with my brother and his friends when I first moved to Edmonton. Most vividly, I recall listening to it, standing at a bus stop on 100th Street at the top of the Walterdale Hill, with the small snowflakes of late fall coming down. So maybe this is mostly a nostalgia entry, but it's also a great synthpop song too.

A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard.

2003-04-27T19:40:00.000-06:00

Trying To Find Gold In A Silver Mine

Two weeks less a day since my last post. Is this a new record for me? You don't care, do you?

Well, I hope I will be able to turn this around. I've been reading Biz Stone's book on blogging, and it might be getting me a little more motivated. I'm going to try to do some half-hour blog entries--the monsters I tend to crank out usually take an hour or more, and leave me depleted of time and topics.

In my defense, last week's free time was mostly taken up by our belated rush to do taxes. (For those of you outside of Canada, I should mention that our tax deadline is April 30th, not 15th or 5th.) Rather than go to H&R Block like we have the last few years--or Nicole has, anyway--we invested in an actual tax software package, QuickTax. Then we had to organize all of Nicole's writing expenses, and then our house-related expenses for the past year, because she can claim about a tenth of that because she works at home. That's what takes the time, and that's what we put off.

We did finish it, though, and we will be getting about a $2600 refund. That's mostly because of the way I set up my taxes--for my paycheque, I'm not using any deductions that I could be getting if Nicole's income is low. That way, if she makes money, then she may have to pay taxes(because publishers never deduct them), but I won't. And if she doesn't make any money(or not much--she had some readings and e-book sales this year, but no big new contracts), then she doesn't have to pay any taxes, and I get a refund. Also, I'm helping to support the Canadian government by leaving my money with them for several months, to gain interest, rather than selfishly keeping it to myself.*

And then there was the Cult of Pain meeting, which was last night. We had three pieces to critique, and being me I barely got around to reading them before the day of the meeting, let along critique them. But I did, finally. And then there was a big snowstorm, and our two Calgary members(who were driving up for the meeting)were trapped by highway closures. So we only had one of the three authors to comment on.

I also finally gave in and tried Kazaa, and have managed to find a whole bunch more of the old Frantics radio shows that I've been looking for. So that took up some of my time, too. Just the searching for them--I haven't gotten around to listening to most of them yet.

So that's been my last couple of weeks. Oh, and there was Easter in there too, but since we actually stayed in town, we didn't have as much for family commitments--Wayne dropped by on Saturday, and then we went to Nicole's parents' new house in Beaumont for Easter Sunday dinner. My dad was down for a couple of weeks, too, but he spent some of that visiting other people out of town; there was another "Easter" dinner on Palm Sunday with some of his family, including my cousin who's getting married this summer.

Has my topic wandered enough? Well, I've still got ten minutes left...

In the Biz Stone book(whose title I am too lazy to go upstairs and check, so let me just check his web site instead), Blogging: Genius Strategies For Web Content, he covers some basic blogging techniques that I already know, but he also does cover some interesting things I hadn't considered. One of them, for a possible moneymaker, is the Amazon.com Associate program. I mean, I discuss a lot of books and CDs, and theoretically someone could be moved by my review to click through and buy it right away online, right? Yeah, maybe it's just optimism and crass greed, and let's face it, I get about 15 visitors a day as it is, so my odds of making any money would be slim. So the question is, would the minimal chance of slight additional income justify the effort of searching on Amazon every time I mention something they have in stock? We'll have to see.

And now it's time for another countdown installment:

330. Elton John: Honky Cat, from Honky Château

I remember listening to Elton John's "Greatest Hits" album as a kid, though I didn't retain a lot of the songs in memory. But this one certainly sounded familiar to me, and it's held up over the years. It's got a great light, bouncy feel to it, with lots of brass and piano. Also contains a four-letter word(well, in present participial form, anyway), which I didn't clue in to for many years.

329. Les Misérables: One Day More, from Les Misérables Soundtrack

This montage piece from the musical checks in with a number of characters as they prepare for one of the most eventful days in the entire story. It works best because of its fugal structure, I think--each character introduced singularly at first, and then intermingling almost cacophonously in the middle until at the end they come together in one glorious passage of harmony that rarely fails to bring me to tears. This song is one of the reasons I still like musicals so much.

Take a fantastic multimedia voyage inside your own body!

2003-04-14T23:32:00.000-06:00

There's Nobody At The Wheel

I've started doing dishes during the week.

I've never really done that. Well, that's not quite true. I used to wash dishes during the week, when I wasn't working full time, but I would then wait until we were out of a lot of things before I would condescend to do them. When I am working full time, then I generally would wash them on the weekend, in a two-hour or longer session, because that's what happens when you let them build up for a week. Often we would still run out of something during the week, and then I, or Nicole, would have to wash it anyway...but it got dirty again immediately, so that didn't really count.

When Simon was drinking bottles, I would also have to wash bottles at least twice a week, because we just didn't have that many bottles in the house.

But for a while now I have been increasingly frustrated with how little spare time I actually have on the weekends. And I had this extra time that was coming from my shorter hours at work, which was not really "spare" because it fell into the pre-supper family time slot. So I thought, why don't I do some dishes during the week? We could still socialize, and I would still get some free time later in the evening.

My original plan was to do dishes every night for a week and see how it worked. That didn't last...well, it didn't really start. But I have been doing them consistently every two or three days for a few weeks now, and I think I like the new system. There's less counter/sink/stove space taken up by dirty dishes, and I do have a little bit more time on the weekend.

I don't actually dislike doing dishes, really. Like many tasks, I am initially reluctant to do it, but once I get into it I am dedicated monomaniacally to the task until it is finished, or I am forced to stop. Really.

Thinking about that makes it all too clear to me how Dissociative Personality Disorder(sometimes called Multiple Personality, or, incorrectly, schizophrenia)works. It's like if I turned into Dave the Dishes Guy whenever I did dishes. There would be one personality(or a number of them)that hated doing dishes, so they would send Dave up to the front whenever dishes-doing presented itself. I, the core personality, would say that I hated doing dishes, and luckily I didn't actually have to do them. And so on. Except that normally, instead of doing dishes, it's surviving parental abuse or something. Though I remember a writer I heard saying on Fidonet, once, ended up with his characters living in his head as separate personalities. He called them "the peanut gallery".

Nicole's parents are finally moving down here. Yay! Her mother came down to take possession of the house on the 1st, and so we saw her for a few days. Their house looks pretty big, but then all houses do with no furniture in them. It's a bi-level with a mostly finished basement, and apparently a pretty good garden as well. I'm no aficionado of gardens, or plants in general, but occasionally I will admit that flowers look pretty.

As I understand it, they were moving their stuff out of the house(or movers were, perhaps)today, and they'll be moving into the new house tomorrow. It's still an 8-hour drive or so down the highway, but at least we won't have to do it again, or at least not nearly as often.

I'm totally looking forward to their being closer to us. Luke is still being super-fussy with strangers, but hopefully Grandma & Grandpa will not be strangers for long. So then we will be able to get out to more movies, get more free time(writing time for Nicole during the day, of course, which I am hoping will mean the occasional free evening for me), etc. It sounds selfish, but our children claim so much of our time that, frankly, we need time for ourselves as well. Especially being so introverted...

It's been a while since I updated you on the roller coaster that is Edmonton weather. Right now our snow is all or almost all gone, though it was cold today, and rainy this evening, so a little dusting of snow overnight might not be outrageous. We got up to 18° Celsius a few days ago, but it isn't that long since we got a big dump of wet snow that I had to shovel off the driveway. It's what I call "Indian Winter".

Most days it's cold in the morning, and hot in the afternoon, especially in the car on the way home. So it's hard to find the right combination of clothes to wear, especially when I don't really have that many choices. I should savour this, though, because we'll probably have another hot summer of retreating to the basement during the day and baking with no covers in the upstairs bedroom at night.

A while ago I was trying to figure out some heredity. As part of my Colony World people project, I wanted to try to add some realism by giving them actual physical characteristics--hair colour, eye colour, height, etc. Maybe even tongue-rolling and ear-wiggling.* So I went onto the Internet to see what information was out there.

It wasn't particularly satisfying. What's out there is a lot of regurgitation of 25-year-old textbooks, and a lot of very technical Human Genome Project-type data that was not comprehensive yet, nor, often, comprehensible.

For eye colour, the simplistic view is that there are two genes, one for brown eyes(Bey) and one for green eyes(Gey), each with two alleles. If you have one dominant Bey allele, then you have brown eyes. If you have no dominant Bey alleles but some dominant Gey alleles, you have green eyes. If you have all recessives, then you have blue eyes. But in reality there are more like five genes determining eye colour, I think, and obviously the above doesn't fully explain eye colour that changes over time, let alone hazel, grey, and all those in-between colours.

For hair colour, even the simplistic view is hard to find, but it sounds like there are supposedly three genes for that, one for reddishness and two for darkness. To get blonde hair, you have to have all recessives; the more dominants you have for dark hair, the darker your hair is. If you have light hair, and dominant red genes, then you have red hair. But again, the situation is more complex. There are links between hair and eye colour genes, too, not to mention skin colour, and then there's texture, curliness, thickness, etc.

I heard that they have just finished the complete mapping of the Human Genome Project(I thought they had already done that, but I guess it was just an early draft), but I imagine it will take them a while to be able to figure out what all the genes actually do. Still, I got the impression that, in some cases at least, the information is known, but has not yet been translated into a good readable layman's text.

In the meantime, I guess I will have to muddle through with my imaginary people as well as I can. I still have to figure out how the starting people's genes are determined; my first attempt, giving a 50% chance to each allele, left me with hardly any blondes. I need the seed the populations more carefully, I guess.

Nicole has been reading S.M. Stirling's Nantucket series recently. When one of us is reading a book that the other has already read, then there are generally continual demands for progress reports and discussion of the plot, predictions on where it's going and hidden smiles at the accuracy or lack thereof of those predictions.

What I didn't expect, though, was that it would make me want to play Civilization again.

I was a nut for the original Civilization game, when I first tried it, and I played it almost nonstop for years. I brought each world to the pinnacle of completed development, as few squares uncultivated as I could manage. But Civilization II, when I got it, proved to be too much. I have finished maybe four games of it, and generally it languishes. I keep the link on my desktop, but it is rarely clicked, nor do I often dig the CD out of the drawer.

But the whole idea of a small but high-tech civilization being plopped back down into a world with well-developed Greek, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures, among others, sounded interesting. So I tried to put together a little scenario. Civilization II has an actual "Cheat Mode" in the game, with a number of tools that are fairly usable for building scenarios...but I still found it frustrating and a little limiting.

What I settled on was just a Nantucketer civilization that had a very high level of technology, and the other ancient civs being slightly more populous. I didn't try to add the empire-building rogue Nantucketer defectors from the book. Maybe I gave the Nantucketers too much of an edge, because they ended up in control of the world pretty easily. That was actually fine with me, because quite frankly one of the reasons I don't like Civ II as much is that it's too hard. I am seriously not looking for a challenge; I just want to build my cities. I played at Chieftain level, and I used Cheat Mode a few more times. Unfortunately, I screwed up something somewhere, probably in the scenario flags, and I was unable to build my colony ship to Alpha Centauri. Oh, well. It's still holding my interest, for a while at least, but there are still portions of the Earth not well-populated--Canada, Australia, India(!), and the whole East Indies--that I have to fill up. That may be where I bog down. And I'm sure I will want to get back to Sims someday...

For books, I finished Until The Celebration, and it was okay. At least I finished off the series. Then I went onto Servant of The Empire by Raymond Feist & Janny Wurts.

I'm not a big Raymond Feist fan, really. Somebody--probably my grandma, who's give me a lot of cool gifts over the years--gave me a Riftwar boxed set at some point. I slogged through the two volumes of Magician, in general being unimpressed. The next two, Silverthorn and A Darkness At Sethanon, picked up a bit, but overall I didn't feel much of an urge to read more of his.

I did pick up Daughter of The Empire, the first book in his collaborative series with Janny Wurts. The whole premise of the Riftwar was that wizards from another world with a very warlike culture found their way into your generic dwarves-and-elves fantasy setting("Midkemia"), and started trying to conquer it. In Daughter of The Empire, though, we got into the warlike culture itself.

It was a very Japanese culture, the Tsurani. The first book followed a young girl, Mara, who is left as the head of her House after the rest of her family(the Acoma)are killed. She manages to survive on her wits and with a motley crew of outcasts, until she manages to regain her family's honour and take revenge on their killers. I read it a long, long time ago--back before I was married, for sure, so sometime between 12-15 years ago.

In this book, the rest of the killers' family(the Minwanabi)get into the act as well, but Mara's power is growing. Then she bought a bunch of Midkemian slaves, and ended up falling in love with of them(Kevin--great fantasy name, huh?). This was done not too badly, though it could probably have been done better. Throughout the book, while she tries to survive the Minwanabi and assorted other enemies, her relationship with Kevin changes the way she sees the world, until she risks everything she has, not for her own survival, but for the survival of her entire culture.

It was surprisingly good, actually. It did drag from time to time, as a chapter of actual tension, battle, and/or confrontation was followed by another chapter or two of recovery, renewed plotting by her thwarted adversaries, etc. There was one very effective sequence, where she, the heads of two other Houses, and what few soldiers they can muster, are trapped in their apartments in the Imperial Palace for one long night, waiting for the Emperor's return the next day, while wave upon wave of soldiers and assassins besiege them. The nightmarish scene came across very well.

I also found it interesting that, while the culture was predominantly Japanese in many ways, including most of the names, there were other influences as well, mainly from the Central American cultures like the Aztecs. I could picture the two cultures becoming integrated far back in their past, but I could still tell the difference between a name like "Minwanabi" and, say, "Xacatecas". Similarly, the use of feathers in adornment, and a few other traditions, were more Aztec than Japanese. It's nice to see that they plundered Earth culture a bit more originally...

I will try hard not to take as long to get to the next installment.

Right now I'm rereading Dare by Philip José Farmer, which I also read a long time ago from the Grande Prairie Library. It's only 200 pages long, at least. I don't recall it as one of his best. The premise is that a number of "lost" colonies and groups of people(like the Roanoke colony, for instance)somehow ended up on another planet, one populated by creatures looking very much like unicorns and satyrs. The satyrs(/sirens, the female counterpart)seem to be routinely discriminated against, and sometimes even killed, in what is all too reminiscent of, say, the Deep South of a hundred years ago, or less. Our protagonist, who has been inducted into the "KKK" of this world, has deep doubts about it, and I seem to recall eventually chooses the right side.

Another countdown entry:

332. Timbuk 3: Rev. Jack And His Roamin' Cadillac Church, from Eden Alley

Timbuk 3's second album was a fair improvement over their first, I think, and may be the best in their admittedly mostly obscure catalogue. This song, fairly harmonica-dominated, has a great bluesy feel to it. The lyrics are not as scathingly antireligious as one might expect, focusing more on the fact that people just need something to believe in beyond themselves.

331. Meryn Cadell: Window of Opportunity, from Bombazine

"Bombazine" is nowhere near as consistent as Meryn Cadell's first album, "Angel Food For Thought", but the earlier album, with its short spoken pieces, is harder to pick out standout tracks from. This one is mostly spoken as well, though Cadell's voice is amply demonstrated as entirely adequate to the task of singing. The lyrics have a sardonic tone and mainly concern sabotaging one's own chances at success. (As in "Falling out the...")

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. Stephen King, "IT"

2003-04-08T23:28:00.000-06:00

Now I Moan, And Now I Holler

Once again trying to catch up, without having the time to write about much of real-life import. This entry I will devote to the CDs I've been listening to recently, as always mostly from the library.

I should announce one bit of real news, though--I'm getting another story published! This brings my total to four, I believe in real professional markets. The story is "The New Paranoia Album", which started as one of my many four-word stories, the four words in question being "Goose Corn Paranoia Album". The goose and the corn didn't survive too many drafts, but the Paranoia album caught my interest from the very start.

I actually have rewritten the story quite a few times by this point, which is impressive for me because I hate to rewrite. It's always been one of my favourites, though, probably because music was so intrinsic to the story. Each rewrite was mostly an attempt to add a little bit more onto the end to make it "finished"; the editor said that he liked it a lot on first reading, up until the ending, so at his request I rewrote it yet again, and he bought it. It will appear in the Canadian SF anthology Open Space, which I believe is scheduled for release at this year's Worldcon.

So I'm psyched, and maybe one of these days I'll get off my butt and send out another story. The email submission process for the anthology was much easier than the whole printing & mailing thing, especially since it's Nicole's computer that has the printer... But mostly it's just excuses. Mostly I'm content with my writing career as it is, though. At least it doesn't take up too much of my time.*

Okay, on to the CDs...

Aaliyah I like her name, but I classed her with all those black singers making uninteresting music--Brandy, Monica, Nicole, etc., and their male counterparts as well. But I read some good things about her, posthumously, so I decided I would check her out. Well, I can't say that hearing this album turned my world upside down--it was mostly pleasant, but innocuous, though the track "I Refuse" was a bit more powerful and I liked it.

Palace Music:Arise Therefore It took some detective work to find the name of the "group", since it is nowhere on the album. You can look it up at the All-Music Guide(along with Palace and Palace Brothers)if you're curious. Essentially it's one guy, but he usually likes to use "Palace" or one of its variations. It's not as inaccessible as some of the stuff I've tried at random(like Sparklehorse, for instance)--it's fairly sparse, but with a little bit of a beat to it, country-folkish. It was hard to pick a standout track, but the opener, "Stablemate", caught my attention. If I have a chance, I'll give it another listen.

Destiny's Child:Survivor I liked the title track, which I caught the video for many months ago, and finally got around to checking out the album. It's not that much more interesting than Aaliyah, so maybe I wasn't wrong when I initially pegged them as En Vogue emulators. "The Story of Beauty" was also an interesting track, but very similar to "Survivor" musically.

Sonic Youth:Murray Street Grabbed this one off the shelves to see if Sonic Youth have moved in any direction to make them more listenable to me. They haven't, though the first track almost fooled me. One track is eleven minutes long, the last two-thirds of that being mostly guitar feedback. I still figure I'm not missing anything.

Paul McCartney:Back In The U.S. I think it would've been better to actually be at one of these concerts, but sometimes I like to listen to live albums because they break songs out of the album context and make it easier for me to actually listen to them. This one, I've already heard most of the songs, and have most of the albums(though some were still unfamiliar), so it wasn't as much of an experience that way. I still don't think much of "Freedom", but then I've only heard it a couple of times.

They Might Be Giants:Mink Car After "Factory Showroom" I slowed down on buying TMBG, and then I think there was an album("Long Tall Weekend"?)only available on MP3 or something. But this one is a bit more back on track. They're still not the band from "Lincoln" & "Flood", but they've turned out some songs that are closer to the quirky pop us long-time fans still love the best. "Man, It's So Loud In Here" is a nice pop number, "Older" is quirky, "Hopeless Bleak Despair" is charming, and "I've Got A Fang" is just silly. Definitely a wishlist item.

Ray Charles:Wish You Were Here Tonight Total impulse grab, off of the "Black History Month" rack back in...Black History Month, I guess. (February?) I've never listened too much Ray Charles, and I confess to generally being dissatisfied with early R&B recordings, however much-touted and much-covered they are. This one was of 80's vintage, and turned out to be mostly covers of country songs, and it really worked. I had to check to make sure that this wasn't the original version of "Let Your Love Flow", for instance, because it's pretty much just as good. The other standout track was "String Bean", a charming song about the gawky girl all grown up and lookin' fine... Time to check out some more Ray, I think.

Nash The Slash:Thrash Wow, I swear it was over a month ago I listened to this one--I am so far behind. Anyway...he was in the band FM, whose early-80's album "Black Noise" I reviewed a while ago. In the mid-80's FM went pop, and probably eventually disappeared. This album, though, is not pop. It's back to the experimental sounds of early FM, somewhere in the same direction as Pere Ubu but nowhere near as inaccessible. It's a good listen.

Neil Young:Are You Passionate? I am hit-or-miss with Neil Young, but this album was solid through and through. I particularly liked "Let's Roll", about the passengers in the plane that went down on September 11th. Definitely a wishlist item--he's rarely sounded better, IMHO.

Jill Sobule:I Never Learned to Swim This is a compilation of songs from her first decade or so--that long? I'd only heard her self-titled album before, the one with "I Kissed A Girl"(though I liked "Karen By Night" better), and this album is proof positive that she was capable of equally good songs all the way through. She reminds me of Kirsty MacColl in a way, so I hope that(since she never learned to swim)she doesn't try to go boating in the Caribbean. "Pilar(Things Here Are Different)", a song about encountering entrenched sexual prejudice in Latin America, is really the standout track.

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band The standard wisdom for a while, especially in the 80's, was that Paul McCartney's post-Beatles work was crap, while John Lennon's was innovative, interesting, and creative. That's far from the consensus these days, and I'm glad, because albums like this one have apparently not aged well. The best song on the album, "Working Class Hero", was already covered to great effect by Marianne Faithfull on "Broken English", rendering this completely inessential. I'd rather listen to "Double Fantasy" anytime, or even Yoko Ono's "Approximately Infinite Universe".

The Pretenders:Loose Screw The Pretenders have also been a bit hit-or-miss since at least "Get Close"--I think that album was pretty good, too, but others disagree. But then, I find their first album pretty lackluster too. Anyway, this is a strong return to form. Really, it is. Much better then "Packed!", better than "Last of The Independents", hardly a weak track on the entire album. Wishlisted.

Pele Juju I was actually looking for the band Pele, but I tried this one instead just to see. What we have here is an all-female(I think--it's hard to tell from the photos and the names, and what does it really matter, anyway?)band doing new-agey-worldy-music. They remind me a lot of the Parachute Club, with sometimes painfully earnest lyrics, but often a good beat to go with it. "Lost & Found" was the only keeper on this one, though--the rest tended to be a bit too samey, but this one sounded like it had some real emotion behind it.

Gene:Olympian I confess I didn't give this CD a good listen, but from the first few songs I got a strong impression of The Smiths. "A Car That Sped" was the only song that really struck me, and I have to admit that the album did show a little more breadth as it went on.

The Stranglers:Hits And Heroes This was a compilation of singles, which mostly reinforced for me that I really liked the Stranglers better after they settled down and worked some of that punk out of their system. While "IV(Rattus Norvegicus)" can be entertaining, I really prefer "Golden Brown", or some of the songs from "Aural Sculpture". So this was mainly good for the chance to hear some of the songs from around the "Golden Brown" era, like "La Folie" and "Strange Little Girl"(which I'd only heard the Tori Amos cover of).

Things of Stone & Wood:The Yearning I'm not sure what to say about this album--it didn't make a strong negative impression on me, but not a strong positive one, either. It was pop-rock, it had lyrics which were probably very meaningful, and it didn't have music which made me want to listen to them. "Barkly Street" and "Single Perfect Raindrop" were the most interesting tracks.

Ryan Adams:Gold Now, while this guy may be filed under Country, I think he's got a much broader appeal than that. This was a very strong album, and covered a lot of musical territory, so hopefully he will get the audience, and success, that he probably deserves. As long he doesn't get confused with Bryan Adams too much. (And Bryan's star has mostly faded these days anyway.) "Enemy Fire" and "New York, New York" were my favourite songs, though "Cannonball Days" was a good track from the mostly-acoustic "Side 4" bonus disc. I'm not sure if this is a wishlist item or not, but it might be...

Linkin Park:Hybrid Theory Okay, now I think I've got these guys straight from Blink 182.* They're more on the serious metal side of rap-metal, not the goofy side. Mostly they were too heavy for me, but "In The End" was appealing. I'm sure I'd heard it on the radio, anyway.

Jack Grunsky:Dreamcatcher This is another children's one that I got for Simon; it didn't catch on with him, so I didn't listen to it as much as I did "Imaginary Window"(whose songs I could probably all sing from memory). It didn't seem to be quite as good an album, either, but it might have grown on me.

Sarah Harmer:You Were Here This one started off quite strongly, but lost some of its momentum as it went on. The first few tracks, particularly "Basement Apt.", were great, and had a bit of a beat to them, but when they got more acoustic I lost interest. Just the way my mind works a lot of the time. But I will check her out again.

David Gray:A New Day At Midnight I don't tend to like the male singer-songwriter types as well as the female, and I'm sure there are a variety of reasons for that. Suffice it to say that David Gray does not violate that rule much on this album. "Be Mine" was mildly interesting, but in general the album made little impression.

3rd Force:Vital Force I guess 3rd Force is a mostly, or completely, instrumental group, somewhere in the vague region of Shadowfax, but with a little more rock to them. The album sounded okay as a whole, but it still didn't stick with me.

Russ Ballard:At The Third Stroke I don't even know why I got this album. It's a CD repackaging of a late-70's rock album that didn't have much to distinguish it.

And that's the library CDs. Since I've been listening to music so little at home recently, I've started grabbing some of my own CDs(computer-selected at random, of course)to listen to. Often I just don't get to know these albums as much as I could, probably just because, by this time, each album comes up only once every year or two in my overall cycle. But since I wasn't listening to albums from my cycle anyway, I felt no compunction about listening to stuff out of turn. This is a big step for me, really...*

Now another entry in the seemingly never-ending, but actually finite, countdown of my 750 favourite songs:

334. P.J. Harvey: Down By The Water, from To Bring You My Love

I'd never heard of P.J. Harvey when I first saw the video for this song, and I have to say I'm not sold on the rest of this album, either, but this song is so musically striking I couldn't help but like it. It manages a tone of menace without being abrasive.

333. Tom Waits: Martha, from Closing Time

From Tom Waits's first album, before he started to go all gravelly and stuff. I've heard his earlier albums written off as "lounge singing", but I guess it depends on whether you think that is bad. This is lacking even the gritty feel of the underside of society that developed quite early on, and is mostly just a sentimental piano ballad, but I guess sometimes I like sentimental.

No one can ever know for sure what a deserted area looks like.

2003-04-03T22:52:00.000-07:00

Until I Lose My Senses

It's really time to catch up on something, even if I don't have time for one of my full-fledged novel-length entries yet. So I'll try to get up to date on my reading, because I've been going through a lot of books recently.

Last time I got up to Son of The Mob, I guess. After that I went onto Dick Francis's In The Frame. As you might have guessed from the title, the main character is, not a photographer, but a painter. Who mostly paints horses, and enjoys going to races, though he doesn't seem to ride much himself, but there's still the horse racing element there. It's not as strong as some of his, but it still holds the interest. There's forgery going on, and he ends up going down to Australia, and the characters are great and spot-on. But it's still a lesser work.

Then I read In The Problem Pit, a short story collection by Frederik Pohl. I find Pohl a bit uneven--Gateway was great, for instance, but the rest of the Heechee series doesn't quite measure up. And so do the stories in this book vary in quality. The stories range from the 1950's to 70's, and by this point I can barely remember them. The title story, one of the longer ones in the book, features a strange sort of think-tank, and had too many characters for its length--I had to keep flipping back to remember which one was which.

On the nonfiction side of things, I also read theough Why People Believe Weird Things, by Michael Shermer, a well-known skeptic. Darren lent it to me, and I did enjoy it, though the title was a bit misleading. It's more like it goes into a number of weird things that people believe, and documents the author's own experiences with them, both as a skeptic and from his earlier, credulous phase. It doesn't get very much into the whole psychology of belief as much as it could. One of the more interesting sections was on Holocaust-doubters, because this is like a case where the skeptics are the ones who are wrong, which shows the limit of skepticism.

Michael Coney's The Celestial Steam Locomotive was an odd book, too. It takes place on a far-future Earth, and is done very consciously as a tale being told to the reader--there are digressions to cover all sorts of topics, from intervening ages of history, and sometimes they get a bit annoying. And then, it's only Book One of "The Song of Earth", so in many ways it doesn't reach much of a conclusion. Book Two, Gods of The Greataway, I haven't found yet; and I think that I've already read the next two, Fang The Gnome and King of The Scepter'd Isle, which unite the series with the Arthurian mythos in a very odd, and not altogether successful, fashion. But it does have an interesting style to it, and is extremely inventive.

After that I went on to The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving. It was only last summer that I read A Prayer For Owen Meany, but I felt like reading this one anyway. I'm glad I did, because this is probably my favourite of his that I've read since The World According To Garp. In some ways it suffers from the same flaw as the Michael Coney, where the narrator of the story bounces around in time, sometimes in the middle of an exciting incident, to digress for two pages about something that occurred earlier or later. But its climax is a powerful action scene worthy of Dick Francis, and its characters are all incredibly weird, but completely believable at the same time. By turns touching, thrilling, and funny, in Irving's best style.

Now I'm reading Until The Celebration, third and thus final book in Zilpha Keatley Snyder's "Below The Root" trilogy. I picked these books up partly because of the author's name("Zilpha" is a great name!), and partly because I once saw an Apple computer game based on these books. The books themselves are not great, with less-than-fully-developed characters and a somewhat predictable plot, but a mildly interesting world. It's one of those "lost colony world" settings, with almost a fantasy feel at times(and it does say "Fantasy" on the spine), with no real high tech, except for some psychic powers and the like.

I'm also slogging my way through Billion Year Spree by Brian Aldiss, which I started a few years ago and bogged down in then. It's a history of science fiction, at least up to the early 70's, and I'm still only up to H.G. Wells. I guess I'm just really not that interested in the topic, in early forms of science fiction, and whether this book qualifies or that one does, and all the dozens of utopias that seem to be produced whenever people feel complacent enough. Maybe it'll pick up once we get into the pulp era or something.

That's all you get, for now; time for another countdown entry:

336. Laurie Anderson: Same Time Tomorrow, from Bright Red

On her last few albums, Laurie Anderson has done less of the music-backed storytelling that came up so often on her early albums, but this is one of her best. It is featured both on her more musical album "Bright Red", and her more story-oriented album "The Ugly One With The Jewels", and seems to fit in equally well on both of them. Although I have to say that I hope the cliche of not being able to set the clock on one's VCR is getting a bit dated by now. I mean, c'mon, people, it's not that hard, right? Nowadays they do it automatically--if you happen to have a PBS station in your time zone. Plus, how else are you going to do timer recording? And do they flash "12:00" anymore, either?

335. David Byrne: Don't Fence Me In, from Red Hot And Blue

I don't know which Cole Porter musical this is supposed to be from, but I always gathered it was supposed to be done as a twangy country song or something. David Byrne's cover version, with the array of Brazilian drums in the background, takes it up a notch in energy and tempo and makes it much more fun.

Telemann once yodeled to Bach, "Flounder is critical with wine." --Racter

2003-03-26T21:48:00.000-07:00

Swimming Through Apologies

I got a new hard drive for my computer this week. Excitement, huh?

I've been thinking of something like that for a while, but a talk with Edna at work about how low hard drive prices were settled it. I had two 6-gig drives, and I was getting cramped on both of them. I wanted to do something about it while I still had enough free space to burn CDs.

That seemed to me the easiest way to copy/backup my D: drive, onto CD. I'd already taken three or four CDs worth of material off of there, but it kept filling up. I had a few CD-RWs, some of which I had burnt things onto for the Calgary trip last year, and I made up a plan of which combinations of directories to put on which CDs. Very efficient, the whole thing.

I ran out of CD-RWs, though. No problem--I had a bunch of CD-Rs that I'd gotten from work because they weren't working very reliably. I had burned a couple and had no difficulty, so I figured they just worked on my computer. I burned one, and it was fine. The next one some files didn't come through, but they were MP3s I was pretty sure I had backed up somewhere else. Then the next one didn't work, after three tries. I tried at 24x, I tried at 8x, and eventually I decided that maybe that was just a mostly bad batch after all.

So, I rearranged things to put the less mutable files onto other CD-Rs that I had on hand(but which had not been free), and then reburned the CD-RWs, and I had enough room.

I had been planning to go last Saturday, until, in shopping around on the Internet to compare prices, I discovered that one store was having an actual sale on the next weekend, that is, the weekend just past. So I held myself off for another week. I found myself drawn perversely to updating things like my book and music catalogues, stored on my D: drive and already backed up. Well, considering how long it's been since I did some of those things, I didn't mind that much. I copied them to my C: drive temporarily.

Finally, on Friday afternoon, I went to the computer store. $138 for an 80 MB drive--sweet. But I was worried about compatibility. I've got an HP computer, a Celeron 433, that I bought...well, shortly after Simon was born, so about three and a half years ago. And I'm running Windows 98 SE. It was entirely possible, I figured, that one or the other would be unable to cope with 80 MB. I asked at the store, and one of the tech guys tried checking it out, but concluded that HP supplied no helpful data one way or the other. His advice was to bring my computer in, and they would try to install the drive on a day when they were not busy with the sale. My computer might not be able to handle anything higher than 20 GB, or even 9.6 GB, or it might have no problem with 80. He couldn't tell.

I did that yesterday afternoon, and stood there with some trepidation as the tech tested the drive. And, lo and behold, my computer had no problem with it. Yay! So now I have an 80 MB drive. I did have to download "MaxBlast", an overlay program from Maxtor, the disk's manufacturers, because other Windows 98 SE wouldn't be able to grok the sheer immensity of the disk, but that worked no problem.

Now my biggest concern is the fact that all the files, copied back onto my new D: drive from the CD backup, default to having the read-only flag set. The same way that files always do when you copy them from CD, for some brain-dead reason. I mean, sure, unless you've got one of those fancy systems where a CD-RW can be treated as a gigantic floppy disk, the files on a CD-ROM are by definition read-only, but is there any reason that that flag should persist when you copy it to your hard drive? It wouldn't be such a big deal if there was a way to easily set the flags on all the files in a directory, and in its subdirectories, but as far as I know there isn't. (If there is, then let me know!)

Oh, and for some reason, in the backup procedure, all the files in the /usr/bin directory of my cygwin installation disappeared. In the sense of becoming invisible, that is. They were still there--I could see them from within cygwin--but Windows Explorer would have none of them. It claimed the folder was empty, not even hidden files within it. Cygwin knew that it was full. And when I checked, the \cygwin\usr\bin folder on the backup CD was similarly empty--but that's where I copied the files from, so it must have worked... Anyway, I solved the problem easily enough by copying everything from /usr/bin to /usr/bint from within Cygwin...and those files showed up no problem in Windows Explorer. I haven't quite worked up the courage to delete the original /usr/bin folder(now called /usr/bing), but I did rename it and replace it with the visible-file copy.

If it wasn't for the backup CD looking the same, I would blame it on a bug in the overlay program, but I guess it's not that. I don't know what it is, but I've worked around it, so unless it shows up again I won't worry about it.

We take Luke in for a checkup early tomorrow morning, so I have to finish this quickly, before "The West Wing" starts. (I'm still a bit annoyed that last week's episode was pre-empted by the war...how shallow am I? I'd rather see a fictional American president than the real one, I guess. I can't take George W. Bush seriously with that eternally puzzled expression on his face.)

I finished reading the Steven Erikson book, of course--in fact, I've read four more books since then, but I might not have time to get to all of those. Anyway, it turned out to be a pretty damned good book, and I will continue in the series. I already had the next one, Deadhouse Gates(900 pages, to Gardens of The Moon's 700), and on the weekend I picked up the third, Memories of Ice(1100 pages); the fourth is out in hardcover, but I didn't check the page count.

Oddly enough, the characters that came together in the first book seem to split up into two groups--as far as I can tell from the back cover blurbs, anyway, you follow one group in the second book, and the other group in the third book. No idea how long the series is projected to be, either--these days you can get away with any length, it seems, with Robert Jordan opening the way. Anyway, the book did a great job of juggling all of its different characters, mingling modern politics and intrigue with feuds going back hundreds of thousands of years. It's not Robert Jordan, nor is it George R.R. Martin, or Glen Cook, but it you like some or all of those, you might like this series.

After that I read Son of The Mob by Gordon Korman. This is another of his rare teen books, as opposed to his other, middle-school-or-younger oriented books. He has a deft hand with character and humour, very much like Terry Pratchett in a way, though so far he sticks to mainstream. This book is not quite as funny as some of them, and there is a lot of seriousness in the underlying story of the son of a mafia don(who wants nothing to do with his father's business)falling for a girl...who turns out to be the daughter of the FBI agent bugging their house. It's still superb.

Time for some more of that lazy, hazy, crazy countdown of spring...

338. Brian Eno & John Cale: Cordoba, from Wrong Way Up

John Cale's participation in this collaboration has been described as "subdued", and this song is a perfect example. It's minimal, with spare touches of synthesizers and Cale's almost detached-sounding vocals. And yet there manages to be a sense of menace that builds throughout the song. Each line of the lyrics seems barely related to the rest, leaving many gaps in the story it tells. I keep thinking that the main character in the song is a terrorist, with a few odd references to packages and the like, but I can't be sure. In any case, it is a powerfully understated song.

337. Berlin: The Metro, from Pleasure Victim

I've finally come around to the opinion that Berlin's first album was their best, or at least contained some of their best songs. This is one of them, with a propulsive synthesizer rhythm(like a train, I suppose)supporting Terri Nunn's vocals, which are by turns biting and melancholy.

I'm not a member of the Animal Kingdom. I'm from the Animal Republic.

2003-03-14T22:25:00.000-07:00

Searching For The Undeniable Truth That A Man Is Just A Fool

It's been a bad week for fire in Edmonton.

On Tuesday, an entire apartment building in the river valley burned down. I believe it's actually on my normal work route, but I haven't been that way in a few days. The street was blocked off Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, at least, causing big traffic snarls, so I've been taking an alternate route.

It apparently started because someone was trying to defrost a water pipe in the underground parkade with an acetylene torch. This is not as weird as it may sound to some people from warmer climates; it's usually an effective process and not that dangerous...except when the water pipe is in a ceiling full of cardboard insulation, from fire codes forty years or so out of date.

Then, last night, there was a fire right in the middle of the Arts District on Whyte Avenue. They haven't figured out what caused that one yet, but since the first one doesn't seem to be arson, we hopefully don't have a firebug on our hands. Otherwise I'd be very suspicious. The casualties there were limited to a pet store on the upper story, thankfully.

Both places are in the oldest sections of town, though. Old materials and old fire codes make them more fire risks. I expect that after this a lot of places will be brought up to the current code.

Weirdly enough, searching for these articles brought up links to another story involving a fire in the same area of the river valley, back in September. This one was just a single apartment, not the whole building, and practically more of the coverage came from the fact that several football players from the Edmonton Eskimos, the local CFL team, helped catch a woman who jumped. It took me a few minutes to realize that it wasn't the same fire as the above, though.

There are a lot of people out there with strong opinions about the whole U.S. vs. Iraq thing. Most of the entertainment community, for instance, seems to be strongly against the war. This is not that surprising to me. From what I've seen in the blogosphere, though, opinions there are a little more divided. This may be because of the "left-wing media bias" I've heard so much about.

It makes me think about Billy Joel's song "Shades of Grey", about how one can't always see issues in black and white any more. But even the song would probably be read as being opposed to war, because, of course, you can't say that the U.S. is right and Iraq is wrong, right?

But I take it one step further. Maybe Iraq is not evil and the U.S. is not good; maybe Saddam is not evil and George W. Bush is not good. But maybe George W. Bush is not evil either. (Or Dick Cheney, or whoever you think is really running the U.S. right now.) Can war be justified even if one side is not evil and the other side is not good?

Well, is war about good vs. evil, or is it about other things? Even though every single analogy ever made is imperfect, because analogy is not the same as identity, let's try some analogies on for size.

Let's say that you have a policeman who knows that a former criminal has firearms in his house. Are the police justified in going into the house and tearing it apart, or arresting the resident? Maybe they are, especially if the firearms are illegal. But what if they send some people in to search the house, and nobody can find the firearms? But the police say that it's still there, because they have secret information(not admissible in court).

Let's reduce it more simply. If the police think that a person is a threat, that they may commit a crime in the future, because they have in the past, then they are not justified in arresting that person, outside of "Minority Report".

And now let's break the analogy. If the criminal attacks or kills a person, then they can be arrested. So, therefore, should we only make war on a country that attacks another country first? Or even then?

Countries are bigger than people, of course. They take much longer to kill, for instance--or at least they did, before the advent of nuclear weapons. And that's the thing. In the days of land wars, or even land, air and sea wars, then if country A attacks country B, then country US could probably intervene before country B was too damaged.

There is, of course, the question of why Iraq, instead of North Korea, or Pakistan, or something. That, I don't know. I didn't say I was for the war, but that I could see the pro-war point of view. It always seems a bit more complex than the anti-war point of view, which seems to reduce to "Killing is always bad". I confess that I don't hold that as an axiom, which is why I can't always make myself agree with people who do. Killing is usually bad, but always? One can always come up with cases. And the opposite of "Killing is always bad" is not "Killing is always good", but "Killing is not always bad".

And that's about enough for me to say on the topic right now. Let me just say that I'm still on the fence.

From Billy Joel and fire, my mind immediately leaps to the song "We Didn't Start The Fire", of course. Which I happened to be listening to on the way to work today, and wanted to write about, but I didn't expect such a classy segue...

I like the song, but sometimes it bothers me a little bit, in a Gen-X vs. Baby Boomer sort of way. It covers elements of the news from, what, 1946 to 1965 or so, over several verses. And then it spends a single verse on 1966-1988(when the song came out), as if it were implying that things had started spiraling out of control once he reached adulthood.

Now, as someone who personally remembers very little news from before 1971*, I find this a little bit annoying. Sometimes I think I should try to come up with my own list of events from my own lifespan, to cover the first twenty years of my life or something. Of course, this would involve some research on my part. I know that there were a lot of significant things that never made it into Billy Joel's song--the Iran hostage crisis(though he does mention the Ayatollah, I suppose), the death of John Lennon, the Challenger explosion--and certainly a few things since, like the Gulf War, Monica Lewinsky, and September 11th.

Maybe someone's already done this. But it's still something I will probably think about from time to time. I'm not a big news follower--I'm pretty sure that I didn't hear about the Challenger explosion at the time, for instance, or cold fusion--so hey, if I heard about it, it must have been important.

Like many people, I imagine, sometimes I like to play the "what if I were omnipotent?" game. Oddly, I wouldn't really want to mess too much with the world as it is. I'd be the master of Holodecks, running simulations of the world if things were different. Experiencing it all vicariously, in a sense.

But then I keep thinking of John Brunner's book The Stone That Never Came Down, still one of my favourites of his. It's been a while since I read it, but here's how I remember it, more or less. At the beginning, they come up with some substance by accident--I think it's a drug or chemical, rather than a virus. A man gets injected with it, or ingests it, or whatever.

And after that he becomes a completely rational person. Not logical and emotionless--rational. Able to take everything into account before he does anything, not just working off of emotion, but taking it into account like everything else. The rest of the book follows him and those he recruit as they attempt to spread this substance throughout the rest of the world.

This, to me, would be something close to utopia.

Of course, the biggest problem with it would be that it might negatively impact the arts. If everyone was rational, what would happen to music, and books, and even TV and movies? Kim Stanley Robinson's The Pacific Edge was an attempt, fairly successful, to write a novel taking place in utopia, but still containing interpersonal conflict.

The way I've come to think about human emotions is kind of like the sense of taste. They are both wired into us for reasons that have nothing to do with modern human society, but a lot to do with whatever environment we evolved in before we started to bypass natural selection. And a lot of them both we probably share with other mammals.

The four basic tastes are sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Anything more complicated than that has to come from the more complicated sense cells in the nose, though exactly how that works I'm not sure. The tastes all seem to have fairly straightforward associations. Sugar is good because it gives us a burst of energy, and when you're struggling to survive, that's a good thing. Salt is mostly good, because it something that we lose in the heat and need to replenish. Sour and bitter are probably meant to be bad, meaning things like underripe fruit or alkaline water. People like me who love sour things are probably freaks of evolution...or maybe underripe fruits are not as bad as all that.

Similarly, if you think why sulfur compounds smell bad, then it probably comes either from decay, or from volcanic gases, both of which are not that good for us. I'm not sure if volcanic gases would be prevalent enough to do that selection, though, so I'm not sure. (And remember, kids, that not everything is an adaptation. Some things are just left over from what we started with.)

So with emotions, I think that they come about the same way. Certain things make us happy the same way the sugar tastes sweet. And perhaps there are higher and more complex emotions the same way there are more complex tastes once you get other organs into it. Anger and fear and all those things affect us at a prehuman level.

Today, we know that eating too much sugar is bad, because we're wired for a time when there was never too much sugar, so we always turn it into fat. Are our emotions any more suited to a modern society? If we understood them better, then we would know better which ones were hazardous to our health.

I finished reading Precursor a few days ago, and it was pretty damn good. As always, despite most of the action seeming to occur off-screen, Cherryh keeps the tension cranked up to a high level. Perhaps because of the fact that the main character is mostly in the dark.

Then I breezed through Neil Gaiman's Coraline, which we had gotten from the library. It was pretty good, though I'm not sure if Simon will be getting a copy anytime soon. I'm taking the cover quote from Lemony Snicket to heart.

Now I'm starting another big huge fantasy series, "The Malazan Book of The Fallen" by Steven Erikson. I picked up the first two books mostly because he's a Canadian author, and I still like to support Canadian writers. I'm about a third of the way into the first book, Gardens of The Moon, and it's interesting. It managed to make the transition from one set of characters to another without losing my interest too much. The first part reminded me of both the Black Company books and, a little bit, of Michelle West's most recent fantasy series. The next part is a bit less intense, with more of a Thieves' World kind of atmosphere to it. So it's not all on one level. We'll see if it keeps my interest, and if I get to the second book anytime soon. Or buy the third.

I've been borrowing Red Dwarf videos from the library and rewatching them for the past few weeks. I got the first two series no problem, but the first half of the third is unfortunately missing; I might have to try to find that in a video store.

Some of them I'd actually only seen once before, and that on Showcase, a Canadian cable channel that, unbeknownst to me, cut several minutes out of them to put commercials in. Filthy swine. So some of what I saw was completely new, though admittedly not completely essential to the plot.

It's between the second and third series that they make a big break, though. Norman Lovett leaves as Holly, the ship's computer, replaced by Hattie Hayridge. Robert Llewellyn joins the cast as Kryten, giving the whole thing quite a different dynamic. And, in a hyperspeed rendition of the "Star Wars" opening info dump, they dispose of several plot threads from the first two series entirely. Maybe they just thought they'd written themselves into a corner. (Although there's still the bit where Lister five years later apparently goes back and marries Kochanski...did that ever happen? Or is that in the same timeline where Lister turned into a brain in a jar?)

Anyway, it's fun watching these again. I hope to be able to find the rest of them, and I also hope that one day they continue with the series...

A week or so ago, someone on the SF Canada listserver posted a link to an article in The Atlantic called "Caring For Your Introvert", by Jonathan Rauch. I tend to think of myself as a classic INTP personality, and years ago I had formulated the theory that introverts recharge from being with people by being alone, while extroverts recharge from being alone by being with people. It's nice to see that other people corroborate this as well.

If you are an introvert, or think you may be one, read this article. If you're not, but you know someone that you think may be(or is just no fun at parties), then read this article too. Of course, if you're a blogger, you're likely an introvert, right?

Now for some library CDs:

Ultravox: Dancing With Tears In My Eyes. This seems to be a collection of singles and rarities, or something, from the Midge Ure era of Ultravox. I'm less than enthralled by Ultravox in general, but there are some good tunes, like the title track and "Hymn", that I hadn't heard much before.

Talvin Singh: Ha. For some reason I was expecting India-style pop, like Dal-Dil-Vog or something, but this is all electronic and mostly instrumental, with some Indian instruments to spice it up a little bit. There are a couple of interesting tracks, but the rest came off as a little bit samey.

Wishbone Ash: Bona Fide. I didn't know much about this band, but I did read up on them at the All-Music Guide, as is my wont. They list this album as a "compilation", but given its lyrical references to September 11th, I'm inclined to think it's not. It veers from hard blues-rock to slightly softer stuff, and at no point struck me as essential.

The Stranglers: Hits And Heroes. Another singles/rarities collection, from the Stranglers, going up to "Strange Little Girl". I'm not that much of a fan of their earlier stuff, but "Golden Brown" is one of my favourite songs, and I found the other songs from that period to be interesting as well.

Spin This!. This is a compilation put out by Spin! magazine, a couple of years ago. I've never read the magazine, but The Spin Alternative Record Guide made quite an impression on me when I first read it. The fact that I found few of the artists lauded therein to be to any degree listenable has palled it on me somewhat, but I thought I'd check it out anyway.

It's mostly either rap, electronica, or sludge. The electronica I already had, and the other two I could mostly do without. The major exception to this was Nikka Costa's "Like A Feather", which must have gotten on by mistake, and Gorillaz' "19-2000", which I had apparently musically misfiled under rap. So hopefully I will get something out of it...

On to the countdown:

340. Duran Duran: New Religion, from Rio

Now that I've gotten over my phase of considering Duran Duran a guilty pleasure, and can like them guilt-free again, I have to acknowledge that I really like this song, mostly because of its interweaving vocal lines. When I first heard it, on an early-80's underdocumented cassette, I had no idea that its subtitle was "A dialogue between the ego and the alter ego", but now I have it on CD.

339. Traveling Wilburys: The End of The Line, from Vol. 1

The trading off of the five vocalists works well on this song, even if I still suspect that everyone gets to make up their own verse, and the harmonies when they get together are wonderful. I also can't help but associate this one with the video, made after Roy Orbison died, with the empty chair where he would have been sitting.

"Petting zoo? I thought this was a Killing and Corpse Raping Zoo..."

2003-03-07T23:41:00.000-07:00

A Break In The Battle

It is truly hellaciously cold(we're talking about the Eighth Circle here, the part of Hell that is actually frozen over)here. Today has been around -30° Celsius, and the rest of the week hasn't been much better. Unless you've experienced it, it's hard to describe. This morning, it was hard to see well enough to drive, because of all the exhaust fumes. Like one's own exhalations, they condense at such low temperatures, and you realize just how much your car is really putting out. (Most of it is probably water vapour and carbon dioxide, but still.) Of course, the most exhaust comes out when one's car accelerates forward, so if you're second in line at a traffic light, you may have to wait several seconds after the first person moves before you can see well enough to be sure you're not going to rear-end him, or hit a snowdrift or pedestrian or something.

Luckily there hasn't been too much new snow falling, mostly because of the cold. The sunniest days, with no clouds to hold in a little bit of warmth, are the coldest. There has been some bitter wind, though, and you discover the true meaning of the word "snowdrift". At those temperatures, snow is in little granules as tiny as sand, and they behave the same way in the wind. They might as well be called dunes.

Was it only last weekend that it was above freezing? I think it was, because Sharna came over in the afternoon on Sunday, and Simon and I were in the backyard building a snowman. Not the front yard, because that's where the driveway and sidewalk get shoveled into--the snow is much thicker, and it gets a fair amount of dirty ice and stuff too. Nobody will see it in the backyard, but that doesn't bother me too much.

I don't have a lot of snowman experience. Only the naïve think that all you need for a snowman is to have snow. You need sticky snow. You need to have snow, and yet have above-freezing temperatures. Maybe in some areas there are a lot of above-freezing days in winter, but northern Alberta is not one of those areas. So you take advantage of them when they come.

Luckily snowmen are not too hard to make. The biggest problem I had was taking the big balls of snow I had after rolling, and trying to smooth them out--they were so loosely packed that they often just fell apart. But I learned quickly. The snowman isn't particularly big, but it's got three globes, radishes for eyes, a baby-carrot noise, and a red pipe-cleaner mouth.

Sunday afternoon it started snowing, and the snowman got another layer on him; Sunday night was when it started to get really cold. So the snowman is still out there, and probably mostly ice by now. I can't help but hope that it gets warm enough for him to melt soon, though. I'm tired of winter now.

Remember how a little while ago I was telling you about Nicole's cousin who was pregnant with twins? The one who had the huge blood clot in her leg, and was in bed resting?

Well, she had her babies. Three months early. 27 weeks along, to be precise.

Needless to say, the twins are still at the hospital, in the preemie care unit(whatever its official name is), until they get a little bit closer to where they should have been born. They were about four pounds, I think. Mostly just skin and bones. Their mother's sent lots of pictures, and it's hard to see much because they've got so much medical gear strapped to them... Poor things, really. Definitely not encouraging siblings, I'd say.

Elizabeth and Katherine(Catherine?)are the names, anyway. Fairly traditional. Okay if you like that sort of thing.*

We'll probably wait at least until the babies are home from the hospital before we go and visit. Karen stayed in the hospital for a few days, mostly to get the rest of the blood clot dissolved now that they weren't worried about her going into labour and bleeding unstaunchably anymore.

Once again, we are grateful for how uneventful Nicole's pregnancies have been, really...

The toilet in our main floor bathroom is not the best. For a while now, it has generally refused to flush the whole way unless you hold down the handle for a few seconds extra. It was still the most frequently used, though, because let's face it, we spend a lot of time on the main floor.

And then, last week, it just snapped. The flush handle, that is. Nicole was going to call a plumber to fix it, but then she decided that $85(one quote)was too much for a stupid broken piece of plastic. So we decided that we would fix it ourselves. With some trepidation, as we are not the most handy people in the world.

On Saturday we headed over to Home Depot, armed with the broken pieces of the handle to make sure we ended up with something reasonably close. I always do that, terrified of buying the wrong kind or size of something, and maybe having to(shudder)return it. We did look at a metal handle instead of a plastic one, but weren't sure the chain would hook into it as well or something, so we just went with plastic again.

And when we brought it home...it installed easily. It screwed together, we snapped the chain into place with a little bit of effort...and the toilet was fixed! We had saved...well, at least $60, if we had to count gas and time into the whole thing. (How much is my free time worth? An open question.) And we gained a certain measure of confidence, having succeeded at a simple home repair task.

For an encore, I even managed to replace the dimmer-switch cover in Simon's room that had broken off a year or two ago, that Nicole thought would need major effort to fix. Admittedly, it had been a handyman who had told her that. Shows what he knew...or maybe he was thinking to make a fast $100 on us.

Of course, we still have no idea how to fix the cupboard door in the kitchen that's come off. I've looked at it, and others that don't come off, and I can't tell what is different between them. I'll save that one until Nicole's parents move down in April. Her dad's handy. Even if he is 63 and coming down with Parkinson's, he could probably fix it better than I could.

Lately, at work, I've been dipping my toe into a programming practice called "Extreme Programming". It's also called "Agile" programming, apparently, because of people who like the concept but distrust the term "Extreme" for a paradigm that's supposed to be used every day, not just in "Extreme" situations. And I can see their point--it sounds like you should be programming while snowboarding or something.

There's a lot of different elements in Extreme Programming(often called XP, to the confusion of Windows users). Refactoring is one I'd already gotten into, and I was getting a toehold on testing. There's some other elements that I don't foresee introducing right away--especially pair programming. That's just like it sounds--having two people programming together. One types, and one watches over the other's shoulder. In my own limited experience with this, the watcher tends to notice a lot of typos and things before the typer.

It won't happen at Joseki, though, because we don't really have another full-time programmer. Edna does a lot of other things, and while I've switched over to Java, she's taken over all of the Visual Basic code--our existing code, in other words.

The Java seems to be going really well. I think I've learned a lot about programming since I went to University, from having done a lot of it, writing a huge project practically from scratch, practically all by myself. Now I find it easier to see what would make things easier, in a way that the software hacker I was, cobbling together little C or Perl or Pascal programs to run tiny simulations or keep track of data, never could. Not that my stamina has necessarily increased or anything.

The extreme programming cycle makes it easy to build a project by taking a large number of small steps. The testing procedures mean that you always know when you've broken something earlier in your code by introducing something new; refactoring makes it easier to avoid breaking things. In the true XP paradigm, you're supposed to write tests first, a few at a time, write your code until it passes the test, and then repeat. At the end of the day, you can decide to throw all the day's code away and start afresh the next day--write it off as a prototype or a blind alley. I haven't quite gotten that brave yet, and besides, I haven't really gotten into version control with Java yet...

Now I want to start doing Java stuff at home. But that'll probably mean upgrading something, probably hard drive space. My two 6-gig hard drives are down to a total of about 1.5 G free, and that's with some stuff offloaded onto CD-R. I hear that hard drives are available for pretty reasonable prices these days. If I can convince Nicole that $150 is reasonable...

We are seriously considering going to Worldcon this year...again. Nicole got a big cheque from Public Lending Rights, which basically a subsidy from the government based on having her books in a number of randomly-sampled libraries across Canada. That's a great system, if you ask me.

The Worldcon is in Toronto, one reason that it's appealing to us; hopefully we'll be able to at least see Steve, if not stay with him. His current living situation is a little unstable, though, and nobody's quite sure where he'll be in August. Also, if you want, as a writer, to get the most out of Worldcon, it's best to get to the parties and schmooze with other writers, and editors...which means it's easiest to stay at one of the hotels near the Con. I don't really want to ride the Toronto subways at 11:30 at night or anything, thank you. Oh, and you should probably try to sign up to be on panels, too. We did that at Conversion a couple of years ago.

So far all we've done is buy one membership for Nicole. We are planning, if we do go, on leaving the kids behind with Nicole's parents(who will be well settled in by that time). Simon will be almost four; he should have no problem with it. Luke will be just a year old, so we'll have to see. The memberships are $275 each(until they next go up), and the airfare is about $200/person, each way, plus taxes and stuff.

I think it would be fun, but it might be overwhelming, too. There's no way we could manage to take in anywhere near everything, of course. And if I do end up meeting writers that I really admire, like, say, Steven Brust, or George R.R. Martin(who's the Guest of Honour), I imagine I would end up babbling stupidly and coming across like a starstruck idiot. Which I guess is one reason to be on a panel, to be able to talk about something else.

I hope we can make it. So far our finances are looking good. But then, we thought we'd make it to Winnipeg's in '94, and ended up wasting our $95 membership fees(either it was a lot cheaper, or we registered a lot earlier). Well, I got to vote on the Hugos that year, but that was about it. We might manage that this year, though we'd be registered too late to nominate...

Crossing my fingers, though.

A while ago I got an email from the guy in charge of nomic.net, who wanted to know if I had any Ackanomic information to put up. I sent him some of the stuff, and recently he nudged me into sending some more. I've got tons of email, of course from my sojourn in the game, and from earlier as well.

I ended up going to his site and wandering round a little bit recently. I felt a vague urge to do something Nomicky, but I really didn't want to actually get involved in a game, because I don't have time for it. I did take a look at the NomicWiki, with a bunch of Nomic information in Wiki format. There was apparently an attempt to do a Wiki-based Nomic game, but that didn't work too well. How can Nomic work if anyone can edit any rule at any time, as one can on a Wiki?

I had also thought that a blog might be a great format for a Nomic. You can have one blog, editable only by the Speaker or something, with the rules, and another which serves as the public forum. Possibly more than one. Just replacing the old mailing lists with blogs.

Apparently someone else came up with the idea, because I found something called BlogNomic. It doesn't look quite like how I had envisioned it, though. For instance, you have to have a blog to play, and while you can do Nomic-related activities on it, you can't actually mention Nomic on your blog. Anyway, it also had other outlandish requirements, like having to update at least once a week, so it probably wouldn't work for me anyway.

There are a lot of dead Nomics out there. I don't know what makes one Nomic succeed and another fail, or one last for years and then fizzle out. When I was in Ackanomic, I was gung-ho for months, then I finally got my share of the responsibility, and then it became work, and then I lost interest. I don't know if that's the typical cycle(it is for me, anyway), but if so it probably depends on enough people being in the right phase at the right time. Also, after time most Nomics tend to accumulate lots of cruft in the ruleset, overelaborate things, and get into phases of just refining the ruleset rather than shaking them up.

It was fun at the time, but I wouldn't do it again right now...

I was finally listening to a bunch of MP3's that I'd downloaded a while ago. I was on Bearshare looking for some rare Barenaked Ladies and Kate Bush songs(not together, I should add, though that would be cool), and found a few. But listening to them...I wondered who the hell labelled them. Not somebody who had actually acquired the track with any information, apparently.

Labelled as "Kate Bush & Annie Lennox" was a song called "When The Rain Came Down". It sounded a little bit familiar with I started to listen to it...but that voice didn't sound like Annie Lennox. It sounded deeper. And then it hit me. It was Happy Rhodes.

I first heard of Happy Rhodes mostly because of a guy named Steve Fagg from the U.K. who sent me a tape of her stuff, among others, when I asked about her on rec.music.gaffa, the Kate Bush newsgroup, some time ago. If you listen to some of her stuff, it sounds like Kate, from her early days...but others sounds nothing like it. Happy Rhodes has a very masculine voice in some ways--she probably sings tenor, and she has a falsetto. The falsetto sounds like Kate Bush; the tenor might have sounded a little bit like Annie Lennox. But honest, it's the same person.

Then there was "The Spirit We", which was labelled as "Kate Bush & Indigo Girls". Another guess, which turned out to be wrong. It was a good song, but I didn't hear any of the vocalists supposedly present. A quick search on the net revealed that the song was by a woman named Rachael Sage, and the same song was available on her website. Sloppy.

There were a couple supposedly with Peter Gabriel, too. Both were from a live bootleg, I think, and of questionable sound quality. One, "Here Comes The Flood", may very well have had Kate Bush on it, but she wasn't singing, so I couldn't tell. The other one was more rewarding--a cover version of "Another Day"(I don't know who did it originally, but This Mortal Coil also did on "It'll End In Tears"), with Gabriel and Bush both singing.

Kate is not the only one to get so mislabeled, though. One of the Barenaked Ladies songs I got was "Marajuanavile"[sic], and a quick listen confirmed that while the vocalist did sound a little bit like Ed Robertson, there was no way this was the Ladies. This was some bad comedian getting into some crass drug humour. I didn't even finish listening to it.

I remember looking for Weird Al Yankovic songs a while ago, too. I got four or five that were not Weird Al, but someone had figured that they must be, because they were parodies. As if he's the only parodist around...

I have been trying, lately, to mostly look for actual legitimately accessible MP3s, from promotional websites or mp3.com or the like. This works best for obscure artists that I can't find at the library, who need to promote themselves by MP3. It's a great way to sample, though it's more hit-or-miss. If I don't like the one or two songs put up on the sample, then how will I know if the rest of the album might happen to be great? I can think of a few albums that I grew to like in spite of the singles. Of course, going on file-sharing services only allows me to go by title, so that's not always any better.

A few more library CDs I might as well do:

Barenaked Ladies:Rock Spectacle

I forgot this one last time. This one was almost their real breakthrough in the U.S., before "Stunt" and "One Week". It's from the tour for their third album, "Born On A Pirate Ship", which is not really considered their best, but it does contain some good songs from their first three albums. Still, considering that I thought "Maroon", their fifth, is their finest work so far, it doesn't do much for me.

They do do some fabulous improvisation stuff live, interpolating all sorts of things into "If I Had $1,000,000", and doing lengthy rap routines, but that's only a little bit tucked onto the end of the CD. That's most of what I was looking for on MP3, to be honest, and I haven't gotten around to listening to it yet. A lot of that is probably bad bootlegs too...

Natalie Imbruglia:White Lilies Island

This one was a little bit of a disappointment. The only track that really stood out for me was "Beauty On The Fire"; the rest didn't do much for me. Maybe I should try to give it another listen.

Marah:Float Away With The Friday Night Gods

When I went to look up this band, I discovered that they were supposed to be inspired by Bruce Springsteen. Could've fooled me--from this album, I would have filed them under "Madchester". Even the opening track, "Float Away", which featured Bruce himself, didn't sound like him, though it was pretty good. It's almost worth acquiring, since about half the album is pretty decent("Shame" being the other standout track for me, mostly because of the guest vocals of Caroline Lost, whoever she is), but the last three songs were just meandering and raucous and turned me right off.

Right now I'm reading Precursor by C.J. Cherryh. This is the fourth of her atevi books, about a colony of humans stranded on an alien planet. The main character, Bren Cameron, is the main liaison between the atevi and the humans, and there are no shortage of tense situations for him to deal with. By this point in the series, it seems that most of the sympathetic characters are atevi(apart from Cameron and one or two others), and Cameron seems to be able to figure them out better than the humans in his life. We'll see if that changes anytime soon...

Before that I read(reread?)Nightwings by Robert Silverberg. If I read this one before(and I suspect I did), I totally didn't remember it. It's really three linked novellas, though I don't know if it was published separately, or maybe serialized. It's set on a future Earth that has overspent its social capital, and ended up mortgaged to an alien race that it had treated intolerably. The book deals with one character and how his life is transformed when the alien creditors show up to repossess the planet. It's pretty good, but not outstanding.

Then there was Blake's Progress by R.F. Nelson. It's a weird book, almost all from the point of view of William Blake's wife, Kate, who is taught by her husband to time travel. They run into other time travelers with their own agenda, and there follows a bizarre battle of reality that makes Fritz Leiber's "Changewar" look like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. Well, not really, but it is pretty spectacular.

This weekend is looking a trifle busy. Besides our normal library/bookstore trip on Saturday, Nicole and I are scheduled to go give blood, and then get haircuts. There was going to be a Heraldry Society meeting too, but Darren's car didn't start, with the weather and all, so he's trapped in Red Deer this weekend and can't make it. And of course the usual weekend chores--dishes, laundry, etc. Plus cleaning the bathtub and cleaning the cat's litterbox, which have been put off several times now, each. We're so bad.

Time to wrap this up, now, with the latest entries in the countdown:

342. The Pretenders: Back On The Chain Gang, from Learning To Crawl

This is a definite classic, from what has grown to be one of my favourite albums. I've known this song for longer, though, and it is bittersweet and melancholy and even a little bit vulnerable, with an exquisitely understated performance from Chrissie Hynde and the rest of the band.

341. Bruce Cockburn: Laughter, from Further Adventures of Bruce Cockburn

A gentle song, laughing at many things but not seeming to mock them outright. More like the way you laugh at a child--sometimes they do things wrong, and sometimes they do things that are just too precious, and either way you can't help but laugh. At least, that's what parenthood is teaching me.

The more things stay, the more they change the sane.

2003-03-03T22:12:00.000-07:00

Treasure Just To Look Upon It

This time I will mostly be playing catch-up on the recent library CDs. I wanted to put more in, but I think I'll be trying to go to bed earl...ier than usual. Last night, Nicole was out volunteering at a charity casino(the charity in question is the Young Alberta Book Society, which has paid her a fair bit of money this year, so it works out)until 2:00 AM, and I stayed up finishing a NaNoWriMo novel that I've been meaning to read for a while. Then there was laundry to put away...so bedtime was pretty much 1:00 AM myself.

Hopefully, with "The West Wing" and "Friends" apparently scheduled to be reruns this week, I can sneak down again for another blog entry this week. That'll be refreshing. On the other hand, I might try to finish the puzzle rally instead. I've only got two more puzzles left...

This time, we have:

Marillion: Araknophobia: I remember this band mostly from the Fish era, with "Clutching At Straws" and "Misplaced Childhood", both of them okay albums but not great. I reviewed Fish's "Sunsets On Empire" way back on the first couple of days of this blog. But I hadn't gotten around to listening to them with their new lead singer, Steve "h" Hogarth.

From this album, I am very impressed. They have managed to update prog-rock to the 21st century without going too heavily into sludge. It's still definitely prog--there are eight songs on this album, averaging just under eight minutes each, with the longest topping 11. And lyrically I have some issues--"This Is The 21st Century", the longest one, is all about how we should abandon those outdated 20th-century attitudes that the universe can be understood logically. But the music is okay, so I think I could still listen to the song.

The standout tracks were "Map of The World", one of the shorter tracks on the album, and "Quartz", longish but powerful from its central image, of "quartz vs. clockwork". But the whole thing is great, and definitely a wishlist item. Now I have to see if they've been turning out more work of this quality... I suppose that h's vocals are not nearly as distinctive as Fish's, but you can't have everything...

Vertical Horizon: Everything You Want: I think I heard the title track on the radio, which was my first inkling that I might have misfiled them under "sludge" some time ago. I think I got them confused with "System of A Down" or something. (Vertical, Down, you know.) This is a very enjoyable album that manages to straddle the line between modern pop and rock quite well. The biggest problem might be that it's just not that distinctive. My first listen, I failed to come away with a clear impression of the album; luckily, I managed to get around to a second one. Also a wishlist item.

Brad Mehldau: Largo: Another one of Tom's recommendations, and again, it's jazz. I admit that it is interesting to hear a jazz cover version of Radiohead's "Paranoid Android", and a few Beatles tunes as well, but that wasn't enough to hold my interest in the album. I'm just not a jazzophile.

Cheryl Wheeler: Circles & Arrows: This one probably came from the compilations of female folksingers I was listening to a while ago. This one also mostly falls below my radar, being acoustic, lyric-oriented folk singing without a lot of musical edge. The only exception that I noticed was the rousing "Estate Sale", which cheerfully extolled the joys of "going through dead people's houses".

Britney Spears: Britney: I didn't really expect to like this album. I mean, it's hard, as a person with any taste in music at all, to not develop the opinion, imposed from outside, that all this teen-pop stuff is crap. I'm bombarded with it constantly. But the fact is, when I sat down and listened to this album, it was really solid. Part of it was that apart from a ballad or two(somehow I hadn't pictured "I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman", the title I've seen so many times, as a ballad, but it was), it was solid uptempo pop, without getting too far into bubblegum territory. Oddly, the song that struck me most on my listening was "Anticipating", which is a little bit cheesy, but also catchy. I'm afraid that this makes my wishlist as well. (I'll give Christina her chance too, don't worry...)

Billie Myers: Vertigo: I was never that keen on "Kiss The Rain", but I thought that "Growing, Pains" had several other great songs on it, like "Having Trouble With The Language" and "Tell Me". It still wasn't an even enough album to make it onto my wishlist, though. I'm not sure if this one is yet either, but again, it's got some good songs, like "Flexible", "'Roll Over Beethoven'", and "Bitter Fruit(Dead Weight)". Lyrically, she maybe seems to be trying too hard, and musically, not always trying hard enough, but I think she's getting better.

Coldplay: Parachutes: This was the CD that Nicole got me for Valentine's day, not the Avril Lavigne. Not to belabour it now, but it's still a great album.

For a while now I've been mostly alternating between the university radio station, CJSR, and "Mix 96", the 80's pop/modern rock station. Mostly I listen to my own tapes, of course, but, especially in cold or damp weather, the tape deck doesn't always work, so I have to resort to the radio.

A few days ago I was driving to work and waiting for the tape deck to kick in(it usually does sometime during the drive, but not always), and 96.3 FM was playing weird stuff. Specifically, they would be playing, say, "Seven Minutes In Heaven", for one minute, and then a voice would say "Six", and they'd start playing...well, something with the word "six" in it. Like a musical countdown. Which I thought was cool, because I've been working on lists of number songs as well. I wish I knew how far back they'd started... Anyway, 8:45 turned out to be "zero", and apparently this was the launch of "96X", the "new" station.

It sounds pretty much the same to me, I have to say. I guess I haven't checked to see if they're still playing as much 80's stuff(which they were starting to call "retro" so they could encompass the early 90's as well)as they used to, which is the only change that might have happened. They even went so far as to say that they're trying to play the pop from the pop/dance/rap station, and the modern rock from the modern/classic rock station. Well, considering that they were already playing anything from Jimmy Eat World(but who wasn't?)to Puddle of Mudd or Default, that's not much of a stretch. Just a marketing ploy, I guess.

They've also been playing a lot of the latest Alanis Morissette single, "Surrendering". It's a weird one, and I can't help but wonder who picked it. I've had "Under Rug Swept" for some time, and frankly I can think of catchier songs they could be playing. I wouldn't have picked "Precious Illusions" either, though that had a cool video. (Haven't managed to catch a video for "Surrendering" yet.) It does seem to work, though. I especially like the little guitar bit at the end of the second chorus. Makes me want to sample it over and over again and build a song around it, if I had any song-building equipment/material around. (Are there any good computerized musical composition programs out there? I keep getting these urges...)

But then, "Unsent" was a weird single too, and so was "Hands Clean", really. Very talky things. Maybe Alanis is trying to become a female Sting. Heh. Just getting more pretentious and multisyllabic with each album, until only aging Gen-Xers listen to her stuff anymore, and "You Oughta Know" is played on classic rock stations the way "Roxanne" is now. (Actually, they should be playing her early pop stuff, like "Too Hot"...that'd be a scream.)

And now straight to the countdown:

344. U2: All I Want Is You, from Rattle & Hum

I still don't understand the people who say that "Rattle & Hum" was one of U2's worst albums, when it has songs like this on it. Maybe it's the fact that they're reusing the "slow buildup/crescendo" element that they already used in "Bad", and even earlier on the same album in "Hawkmoon 269". But I find it a very effective technique anyway. The video for this song was pretty good too, as I recall, with the circus midget and his unrequited love...

343. Crash Vegas: Smoke, from Red Earth

After this album Crash Vegas rarely got this country again, but on this song it really worked for them. Michelle McAdorey's soulful voice lilts through the melancholy music and lyrics to paint a solid emotional texture, almost verging into Cowboy Junkies territory. I could picture Margo Timmins singing this one, maybe an octave lower...

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

2003-02-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

J'ai Tant Rêvé De Toi

The usual long gap. Blame it, at least partially, on Quincunx and his latest puzzle rally. That's been occupying most of my free time since Friday, at least. And my mom and stepdad were in town before that. With our current TV schedule--"24" on Tuesday, "West Wing" on Wednesday, and "Friends" and "Scrubs" on Thursday, that leaves Friday to Monday as prime blogging times. And often I am just not in that space.

This weekend was a little bit different, too, because Nicole was working on Saturday. Well, she was teaching a course for junior-high kids, ones that are interested enough in writing to sign up for a workshop on the weekend. It was pretty cold, in the -20s, so at least they didn't miss any prime sledding time. (Today it's already back close to freezing.) Then we went shopping on Sunday. My mom had brought in Chinese food for us once, and taken us out to dinner twice, so we were three days overextended on our groceries; we could barely scrape together breakfast, and we gave up on lunch and just went out to the mall.

They're working on our roof at work. We're on the second floor of a two-storey building, which we do not own--the building changed owners a year or two ago. The roof has leaked on us, most notable in the washrooms, in the past few years, so it looked like they were going to actually do something about it. In the middle of winter, for some reason. (Maybe just to fix the leaks before the spring thaw.)

It's quite unnerving, though. We can hear footsteps, and sometimes poundings, but quite often crashes, like something weighing a few hundred pounds was dropped, or fell over. One or two of the covers for our fluorescent light fixtures actually fell out of the ceiling, and frankly I almost expected more of them.

Oh, and then there's the lovely tar smell. They've got one of those big tar makers that sits on the ground, with a big pipe that goes right past Edna's window(I'm in the next office)up to the ceiling. So the smell comes right in. They went away for a few days when it was really cold, but they left the tar pipe in place so we knew they were coming back. And they did, yesterday.

It was more fun when they had those guys in removing a tree from the back alley area. That's fun--chopping off the branches, slicing up the trunk, and then grinding up the stump. And doesn't smell nearly as bad.

Digging into the news archives...here's some stuff that I didn't manage to fit into the last blog entry...

We went and saw "Shanghai Knights" on the Tuesday before Valentine's Day. I've become quite a Jackie Chan convert--I remember when "Rumble In The Bronx" came out, I had never heard of the guy, and a few people were gushing about him on alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst. I think I first saw him in "Rush Hour", and was instantly a fan of his style. I'm not as big a fan of Owen Wilson's Big Dumb American routine(which is, at least, how he comes off up here).

But this movie was, overall, a lot of fun. Not deep, and contained a number of cheap shots, but there were some hysterical scenes. I don't know why there still seemed to be some people who, by the end, had not figured out that the detective "Artie" was actually Conan Doyle(though he was, of course, never a detective himself). I was, however, convinced throughout the movie that the thieving orphaned workhouse urchin was a girl, and this would be revealed at some point; however, instead he turned out at the end(this is in no way a spoiler)to be Charlie Chaplin.

I would really like to see "Daredevil" sometime. I was never a big reader of the comics, but I knew of him from his appearances with the Defenders, and I know of Elektra mostly from the "Elektra:Assassin" series, illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz and written by...Frank Miller, I think. That's still a favourite series of mine, and probably due for a reread. But everything I've heard about the movie has been good. "Phone Booth" sounds like it might be an interesting movie, too...

Anyway, when we went to see "Shanghai Knights" we dropped the kids off at Sharna's. This was at the end of quite a few days of snow, and while the main streets had been plowed, most of the residential ones had not. Ours was not too bad, but Sharna's was awful. People were out there shoveling out their parking spots...and putting the snow from there mostly into the middle of the street, so on one street we were actually scraping it with the undercarriage of the car.

Luckily, they started plowing the residential streets out a few days later. Ours was done on Sunday morning, and was really quite fun to watch, as the two plows went back and forth, scraping up the chunks of dirty ice and snow and then maneuvering them around with their blades. There are a lot of driveways on our side of the street, and they didn't leave a single one of them blocked. The streets are all narrower where they plowed, with big piles of ice just off the curb, and if anyone's parked there it can be down to one-lane traffic. I'm glad we have a driveway.

The place where we went to see the movie was...well, it used to be called Eaton Centre, anyway, from the Eaton's department store chain. It's called City Centre now(boooring), probably because Eaton's went bankrupt a few years ago and had to sell off a lot of stuff. We used to see movies there all the time, when we lived just west of downtown. Often we'd take the bus down, but sometime we drove in and parked in the parkade. It was a little weird going back after all this time, but at least the theatres aren't as dilapidated as the Paramount. Still, for a cheap Tuesday, the theatre was not all that busy, compared to the new big multiplexes. Little bit of nostalgia there...

Here's another golden oldie for you. On...what, January 25th? a month ago?...Robert Jordan did his book signing at Greenwood's Bookstore. I went to that. I'm not sure if it was worth it, but what the heck, it was an experience.

I showed up about 10-15 minutes before the signing was due to start. At that point the end of the lineup happened to be near the doors, but it had already snaked around the shelves in one half of the bookstore, and was starting on the other half. I was amazed that they continued to fit people in until Jordan actually showed up(complaining about the cold, of course--why is it that every famous person who's visited Edmonton this winter has done so on our coldest days?), and the line started, desultorily, to move.

The people behind me started talking about the series, and I joined in the conversation. Then a friend came up and joined the woman two behind me, so then it was me and the guy behind me. We talked amiably enough, about the series and other books, especially as we filed ever so slowly past them. I was reading Mirror Dance at the time, and I probably would have been happy keeping to that, but sometimes I guess it's nice to actually talk to someone. I hardly ever stay in contact with these people, but then keeping in touch is hard.

Anyway, he had a digital camera, so when we got closer he said that he'd take my picture with Jordan if I took his. Then he emailed it to me. I decided to put it up, and it will be practically the first picture of me ever to make it onto the Net. He also sent me the practice shot I did, trying to figure out how exactly the camera worked. Here they are:

Robert Jordan talking to the person ahead of me in line--my practice shot with the camera.
Me and Robert Jordan. You should be able to figure out which is which. Not particularly at my best, I'm afraid.

Sharna & Nick came to the signing too, but about an hour after I did, so when I was crossing from one side of the store to the other, they were just at the back of the line...and when I left, they had just crossed over. So we didn't chat much. Anyway, I now have a signed(though not personalized)copy of Crossroads of Twilight, and I've met the man. He seemed a little bit curmudgeonly, but then I imagine he's answered a lot of the same questions over and over and over again. He did some frequently asked ones before the signing proper started, including some pronunciations. While he was signing, I asked him the only question I could think of, about whether or not there were female ta'veren. (His answer was that there was no reason there couldn't be, but they were uncommon enough that the odds we'd see any during the series were pretty much zero. Ah, well. I thought maybe they were just a different type entirely.)

I'm always a bit tongue-tied with writers like that. If we go to Worldcon this year, I'll have to see what I can do about that. Especially if I run into Steven Brust or something.

I'm going to finish up with here with some of the books I've been reading recently--no library CDs this time, trying to save something for the next post in the hopes(possibly vain)that I might post again a little bit sooner.

Right now I'm reading The Second Summoning by Tanya Huff. This is the sequel to Summon The Keeper, and both of them are humorous fantasy about a Keeper, sealing rifts in Earth's reality, her cat, her companion/boyfriend(who she meets in the first book), and her sister, also a Keeper but still in the throes of adolescence. I've been going a bit slow through this book, though--possibly because of the more interesting nonfiction books I've been reading, but the plot has just not been pulling me along, either. The humour seems a bit juvenile sometimes, and the books also feel a bit overwritten, with sentences or whole paragraphs that could have been cut out without affecting the book in any way except thickness. But it's still cute in places.

In my nonfiction stream, I just finished rereading Isaac Asimov's View From A Height. This was, I think, his second collection of the science essays that were published monthly in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for many, many years. This book dates from 1963, and I imagine the essays came from a year or two before that. Some things that he seems to be introducing for the first time have become common knowledge, and some have not--whether because they've been discredited(like the possibility of vast liquid water oceans under Jupiter's atmosphere, which I think I would've heard about)or just discounted. It boggled me a little bit when he introduced the exotic "dolphin" and "porpoise" to his reader, and explained their sonar abilities. Did readers of forty years ago really not know that much about dolphins? But then, it's sometimes hard to figure out exactly what went on before one was born... And the essays on fundamental particles obviously predate the discovery of the quark, too.

It was a fun read, even though my copy of the book was falling apart. I seem to recall that the first five Asimov essay collections went out of print, so he went through and reorganized some of the articles into four books by topic(Asimov On Physics, Asimov On Chemistry, etc.), but I think I've found all or most of them second-hand, so I could read the essays that slipped through the cracks. I wonder if they ever got reprinted since...

After that, I went immediately on to What's In A Name?, by Paul Dickson, which I just picked up a few days ago from the Safeway remaindered book table. Every once in a while there is such a find... It's sort of halfway between All Those Wonderful Names and The Joy of Lex, with various chapters discussing name-related topics. So far I've seen a whole chapter dedicated to a sampling of the many thousands(!) of varieties of apples; "aptronyms", or names that make a person seem suited to their profession(e.g. Dick Curd, spokesman for Carnation Milk, or Zoltan Ovary, gynecologist); and anagrams and such. It's entertaining, and(an advantage over your average novel)easy to pick up and put down repeatedly.

I read three other books after finishing The Black Chalice. The first was Madeleine L'Engle's And Both Were Young, an interesting but slight story of a girl going to a boarding school in Switzerland shortly after WWII. I had of course read L'Engle's "Time Trilogy" early on(though I only encountered the fourth, Many Waters, after meeting Nicole), but somehow I had never gone on to reading any of her other books. When I started going to the adult section of the Grande Prairie library, I often went to the back left corner, where the Fritz Leibers were, because I was big into Fafhrd & Grey Mouser at the time. I saw the L'Engles, and I also saw Stanislaw Lems, but I wasn't brave enough to try them. This may not have been the best place to start, but it was readable enough, and not too time-consuming.

Then there was Waiting For The Galactic Bus by Parke Godwin. This one was a totally random pick from my collection, and I first bought it...September 20, 1992. It had an interesting-looking cover, and a blurb that made it sound like the next Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy or something, but...well, it's not. It was a mildly entertaining satire, heavy-handed in spots, almost devoid of plot. Two stranded aliens on Earth meddle in human evolution, giving us consciousness, and eventually end up running Heaven and Hell. Then they have to prevent the birth of a child who would apparently be likely to bring about Armageddon. Features John Wilkes Booth in a prominent role. It could have been really tedious if it had been long, but luckily 300-page books were considered long back in 1992.

Finally, there was a reread of Nerilka's Story by Anne McCaffrey. I reread Moreta not long ago, and since this one overlaps with it, I thought I'd try to read it while the other one was still reasonably fresh. Moreta's plot has a habit of slipping out of my mind, as had this one's. On balance, though, I liked it better than Moreta. It's first person, and Nerilka was one of the more interesting characters in the earlier novel, so I actually looked forward to finding out more about what had happened behind the scenes. It actually resonated with And Both Were Young to some extent, with similarly-aged characters.

I'm not sure what I'll be going on to after The Second Summoning. Nightwings by Robert Silverberg is a possibility--another thin one, which I may have read before, but I can't be sure. I read one or two omnibuses of Silverberg novels from the library, and I can't remember which ones were in them. I don't remember the stories anyway. There's also the possibility of Blake's Progress by R.F. Nelson, which is a book I picked up for my brother, a big William Blake fan. It's from the Laser line of SF novels, which was apparently Harlequin's abandoned attempt to enter the genre. They tried to treat SF novels the way they did romance novels, and I guess it didn't work...

Shambling ever onward through the countdown of my 750 favourite songs:

346. The Buggles: Elstree, from The Age of Plastic

For a long time I thought this was a woman's name, but then it turned out to be the heart of the British film industry or something. Too late--Elstree became the name of one of the major characters in the D&D campaign that also featured Alfvaen. I do think it's a good girl's name, too. The song itself is a tasty slice of pop, a wistful memoir of B-movie roles over new wave synths.

345. Heart: Just The Wine, from Magazine

I first encountered Heart with their 1985 self-titled album, trying to recast them as a heavy-metal hair band, and "Magazine" was practically my first glimpse at their earlier career. It made a big impression on me, even though it's apparently considered one of their weaker efforts, released unfinished in the middle of label battles. This one is also wistful in tone, and quite affecting considering that it's mostly about hippies trying to figure out what happened to the 60's. Better than it sounds, honest.

What if no one's watching? --Ani DiFranco

2003-02-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

Keep On Talking All You Want

On the weekend we made one of our occasional Whyte Avenue trips.

Whyte Avenue is the heart of Old Strathcona. See, originally there were two settlements--Edmonton on the north side of the North Saskatchewan River, and Strathcona on the south side. At some point they merged, to become known as Edmonton(though I think Strathcona is a way cooler name). Old Strathcona, like the older parts of many towns, became the poorer part of Edmonton, and was apparently quite seedy for a long time.

Or so I've heard, because practically as long as I can remember, it's been pretty happening and trendy. Kind of like Gastown in Vancouver, it's been revitalized and even a little bit touristy. It's sort of the "Arts District" of Edmonton now--it's close to the University, too.

I like it because it's got the main branch of the Wee Book Inn, a used bookstore chain with a few other locations in Edmonton, as well as a used record/tape/CD store called Southside Sound, a comic store called Warp 1, and a few other goodies. Lots of craft stores and such, galleries, etc. They've got a Chapters there now, too. They used to have an independent bookstore called Greenwoods, but that's moved a few blocks south.

When we go down there, Nicole is usually much more interested in the Wee Book Inn. For one thing, it's got a great romance section, which many of the other bookstores in the area are too snooty to have. For another thing...well, she's just not really into comics or music that much. This time, she took Luke(who was asleep in his stroller)into the Wee Book Inn, while I took Simon to my stops.

I really don't need to go to Wee Book Inn. With the library booksale things, I manage to buy more books than I read anyway, so I don't need more. But I went anyway. At least I'm not as indiscriminate as I used to be in there. I'd detail all the books I bought, but I'm running out of time, and frankly you probably don't care. I've got over a dozen stacked up on top of my filing cabinet waiting to be catalogued right now. For the albums I bought, see below.

For the comics...well, there's really only two series I read actively right now--Cerebus and Love & Rockets. I'm sure I've mentioned both of them before. Cerebus is the weirdest thing right now, mostly consisting of Cerebus's deconstruction of the Old Testament, a far cry from the Conan spoofs of the first few issues. It's getting close to Issue 300, too, which Dave Sim declared from the first was going to be the end of the series. So I'll stick with it...and hey, I'm learning all sorts of interesting things about the Old Testament.

Now, as promised, some more library CDs, including some mentioned by Tom in his best of 2002 post.

George Harrison: Brainwashed I confess, when I heard this album, it basically sounded like more George Harrison to me, nothing special or trascendental. Still sort of like "Cloud Nine", because of the continuing presence of Jeff Lynne, but the songs weren't as interesting. The song that stuck with me the best was "Devil And The Deep Blue Sea", because it was in a different musical style(which, without the song actually playing, I find hard to recall). So I'm afraid that his final effort didn't make a big impression on me.

Matthew Shipp:Nu Bop Tom's list was heavy on jazz, at least for me. I'm not normally big on jazz, but I decided to try some of them anyway. This one I actually quite liked. It had enough drum-loops and such to be not quite so musically amorphous as jazz often seems to me. It had a beat, and(apart from the noodly "Nu Abstract")was good listening. This might be an actual wishlist item.

To Rococo Rot & I-Sound:Music Is A Hungry Ghost This one was also instrumental, but much closer to drum 'n' bass than jazz. It was pretty cool, but didn't leave much of an impression on me. I did like the closer, though, "The Trance of Travel". (This precise album wasn't the one on Tom's list, but I thought I'd try the band anyway...)

Bill Frisell:The Willies While labeled as jazz, this album was really more instrumental guitar, like Leo Kottke's "Guitar Music" or Ben Hadley's "Tunes From The Well". Once again, most of it didn't really grab me, and there was a little too much banjo for my tastes. There were one or two cool numbers, though, like the haunting "If I Could I Surely Would".

Dave Douglas:The Infinite And this was precisely the kind of jazz that I have little tolerance for that just noodled around with no perceptible beat or time signature. Didn't do a single thing for me.

Aimee Mann:Lost In Space Apart from the edgy "Pavlov's Bell", this suffers from what all Aimee Mann's solo albums suffer from--a lack of memorable music. When she was in 'Til Tuesday, they could pull off some great melodies--from the edgy new wave sound of "Voices Carry"(the album)to some powerful pop pieces on the next two albums. But her solo work focuses on vocals and lyrics, to the extent that the rest of the song is sublimated, subjugated, and subdued. I'd rather have goofy lyrics that make no sense with a kick-ass tune any day.

John Mellencamp:Cuttin' Heads Mellencamp has been up and down lately. "Whenever We Wanted" has become perhaps my favourite of his albums, and "Human Wheels" was pretty good, but the last two or three(or more--I might have lost track)have sounded a bit tired and/or bland. This one might be a little more of an upswing, with at least the first two tracks, "Cuttin' Heads"(featuring a rap bridge from Chuck D!)and "Peaceful World", showing a bit more energy.

Anastacia:Freak of Nature This one was recommended by another blogger friend, the "Guy in DKNY", who's big into pop. This isn't really my thing, but it was a passable listen. Anastacia has a vaguely Shakira-ish voice, and at least doesn't descend too often into sappy ballads.

I also bought a few at Southside Sound on Whyte Avenue this past weekend. Most of them I had heard before, but I grabbed a copy of Wall of Voodoo's "Seven Days In Sammystown" on the strength of one song, "Far Side of Crazy", and of course having heard some other albums. This one is interesting, with some of the new wave touches of their first album with Stan Ridgway(you may recall their "Mexican Radio"), and only a few tracks(like "Far Side of Crazy")from Andy Prieboy, who came to dominate by "Happy Planet". It sounded promising on first listen, at least, though certainly "FSoC" was still the standout track. It's also funny to look at the group photo of the band on the back--one guy looking like he's in Lords of The New Church, one from The Cult, one in a string tie, and a couple more in reasonable normal-looking suits. A wee bit of contrast there...

I also picked up a copy of Chris Mars's "Horseshoes And Hand Grenades", but haven't listened to it yet. It's weird--after listening to that "Free At Last" sampler album, I ran across this album(not the one with the Chris Mars song featured thereon), and the Mind Bomb album, which was the one being promoted there. I opted for the Chris Mars, because Mind Bomb sounded more glam-metalish and may not have held up for an entire album. They were both on the $5 racks, too, but I had already blown enough money there. I also grabbed vinyl copies of King Crimson's "Beat" and The GoGo's "Talk Show", though my stereo is still shot and who knows when I'll get around to taping them. The other ones I bought include Maren Ord's "Waiting", The Wallflowers' "(Breach)", and Avril Lavigne's "Let Go". Though I realized too late that that was one I'd put on the list I gave my wife when she went shopping for my Valentine's present...well, I'll know soon enough if I goofed.

On to the countdown, I guess:

348. Aerosmith: Livin' On The Edge, from Get A Grip

Apart from having a great video, this is a pretty kickass song, too. I wouldn't say that the lyrics are profound, but they are serious, and it's just generally got great music to it.

347. Steve Winwood: Freedom Overspill, from Back In The High Life

When I first heard this, it was a long time before I could figure out the title of the song. It's a nice jazzy song, but the lyrics are a little bit oblique, and that adds quite a bit to it. Hard to express why I like it so much, really, so I'll just say it's a great combination of music and lyrics, and definitely the high point of the album.

Oh, and by the way, Erik has correctly pointed out that in my "Bacon boxes" a few posts ago, I goofed, because Dianne Wiest was not, in fact, in "Independence Day", or anything else, with Jeff Goldblum. Apparently my data has a few mistakes in it...

Your folks fell in love; love's a very deep hole. --Loudon Wainwright III, "Your Mother And I"

2003-02-07T22:59:00.000-07:00

Baby's Crying, I Can't Sleep

My, how time flies.

I would like to thank Boston Pizza for their insight into the preschooler's psyche. We were eating there on Tuesday, of course with Luke & Simon in tow. Now, Simon normally eats fries, or possibly garlic toast, in restaurants, and we have not generally actually ordered anything for him more than that. But this time we gave him a children's menu, and read him what was on it. Two of the items were "Dino Fingers & Fries"(basically dino-shaped chicken cutlets, with fries)and "Bugs & Cheese"(bug-shaped macaroni with cheese sauce).

So Simon decided to try Dino Fingers & Fries. He only ate one of the "Dino Fingers" at the restaurant, but we took the rest home and he finished them off the next day. Now, this is the child that would rather eat vegetables than fruit or meat. (Crackers and peanut-butter sandwiches still head the list, of course.) The only meat we've been able to get him to eat for a long time has been pepperoni, the really thin, dry kind. Everything else he refuses to even try. But he liked the Dino Fingers.

Tomorrow, when we go grocery shopping, we will have to see if we can find something we can use to produce Dino Finger-like objects. I swear it's just like those frozen chicken cutlets you can get, with breaded processed chicken meat or whatever; if we can just cut them into appropriate shapes, then we may be good to go. He may require fries to go with them, too. But it is a victory for parent-kind.

I keep getting tempted to tell him things like "You know, dinosaurs taste just like chicken," or try to describe other things as Dino-whatevers. But I guess we shouldn't push it.

By the way, he's getting closer to reading, I think. He's learned to spell another word(besides his name, and possibly Luke's)! It's "RITZ". From staring at the cracker box while he eats them, I guess.

Luke is very close to learning to crawl. For a few weeks now he's been into the "backward crawling" stage, where he gets up and hands and knees(well, not always knees, more often legs or feet)and ends up kind of pushing himself backwards. But since he can pivot fairly well, he can really get anywhere he wants...except straight ahead, which is of course where he can see. Then he started to sort of move ahead by progressive sprawling and pulling himself up slightly forward.

Now he's doing something which is still not quite proper crawling, but it does involve leg movement more or less in time with the arms, though still mostly on toes rather than knees. And he can't maintain it for very long...but it won't take much time now. It is totally time to pick up all the junk we've left to accumulate on the floors since we taught Simon not to put things in his mouth.

What have I been doing for the past couple of weeks? Well, Nicole's parents came down, and finally bought that house down in Beaumont. They were down for most of last week, though Luke was still making strange so they didn't get to relieve a lot of pressure on that front. They did get to help sate Simon's never-ending hunger for people to play games with--Sorry!, in this case, as well as Snakes & Ladders, and Old Maid and the other card games he got for Christmas.

They also went shopping for us one day, after we had failed to make it to the story for three days in a row. But that was when inches of snow were falling every day, it seemed, and I never managed to get home before 5:00, having spent close to an hour in traffic and generally being exhausted. It's always weird when other people go shopping for you...though Nicole did write down many of the specific brands so they would know what to get. They got a few larger sizes, though, which probably make sense for people with a deep freeze but not so much people with just a fridge/freezer.

After that...well, I was just not in the mood for blogging. I played a bunch of Sims, finished up one of my households' career tracks finally. I've started on another one, but this is one that have gone through three careers each already and so has most of their skills trained up quite high. They also have about 400,000 Simoleans of cash, so they really don't need to work at all. So my enthusiasm has dropped slightly; I may switch to another neighbourhood for a while.

I've also been turning my attention to a "names" project. I've been collecting names since I was in high school. I would go through whatever sources I could(though generally not phone books, because that was just too much data to type in)and collect first and last names. I started off doing middle names, too, but generally those just fall into one or the other category.

What I wish I had done from the first, though, was mark whether the first names were male or female. Often it's hard to tell, if you just have a name and not a person to associate it with, but often I had that information available to me at the time...and now, I don't. What I have right now is 22,134 first names assigned to one sex or the other(or both), and 6,454 first names that are "ungendered". Sometimes I try to go through them systematically and see how many I can figure out, but it doesn't take me long to get discouraged from that. I don't really want to misassign too many of them, you see.

I want to try to integrate this into my colony-world project at some point. What I have right now is four sets of names--actual common names from The Baby Name Countdown, a selection of the uncommon names from the same book(which has close to 200 pages of them), a list of names that I think are cool, and a random selection from my overall collection. They each have four different probability sets--one where each name is equally probable, and three others where each name has a different frequency. (In one, "Michael", "Christopher" and "Matthew" may be the top boys' names in group A; in another it might be "Reinaldo", "Marques", and "Dennis".) And then, each colony has two name-set/prob-set combinations, one commoner than the other.

It's kind of complex, but it seemed right at the time. See, in The Baby Name Countdown, I discovered that even if you take all the common names down to those that have a 0.002% share, you still only get 60% of all names. This may be a comparatively recent phenomenon, and it may be a transitory one. But yeah, then you have those thousands and thousands of less common names. So at first I picked a random uncommon name for each of the other 40%, but that was time-consuming as I haven't gotten even close to entering all of those names into the computer. So I picked a sample and then gave those their own probabilities...with the result that in one colony, for instance, up there with "Michael" and "Christopher" are such interesting names as "Khaivien", "Cordarell", and "Omran".

What I really want to do, though, is to have a master list of all names, and then each colony can have its own list of common names. If someone gives their child an uncommon name, then it comes from all the names in the list. But this will take up more space in my database. Especially if I want to be realistic and have the frequency of names change over time. But I haven't figured out how that would work, in general; I wonder if people have researched it much in the real world...

Anyway, this week I've been going through The Melting Pot Book of Baby Names, which has a fair selection of names from other cultures that may give me trouble in trying to determine the gender of on my own. I can't get too much done at a time, of course, because it's hard work typing with one hand while holding the book with the other. I've never found a good mechanism for holding a book open automatically, so that you can see all of the page, and turn it easily. I'm sure there is one, but it's probably too expensive.

One of Nicole's cousins is pregnant with twins right now. This is her first pregnancy, so she and her husband will probably get a crash course in parenting once they're born. We had a Linux consultant in the office last week who also had twins, and he said that he had to take five months off work to help his wife, and then I think they had to hire someone to help after he went back to work. We'll see how Nicole's cousin handles it.

She's already on maternity leave, though, even though the due date isn't until May(close to her own birthday, in fact), because apparently she had been having dizzy spells. When she got them checked, it turned out she had a foot-long blood clot in her leg. That is, of course, never good. So she's spending most of her time in bed, because it's painful to walk, and once she got out of the hospital has been self-injecting with anticoagulants to try to dissolve the thing. 'Cause if a piece breaks loose, and gets into the brain or heart or whatever, it's seriously bad news. But modern medicine is apparently on the case.

I'm not quite sure, but I'd have to guess that this may be her last pregnancy as well as her first. I doubt she'll be eager to repeat this process...even if she does recover from raising the twins out of babyhood.

A whole whack of library CDs, because I've been going through about one every day at work. I'll start with last week's, before I forget all about them.

David Gilmour:About Face. At one point I was keeping slavish track of which videos I'd seen, and how many times, so I remember that I saw a video for the song "Blue Light". At the time I had no idea that he had anything to do with Pink Floyd(the only song of theirs I really knew at the time was "Bike", which I'd liked as a kid), and I linked it oddly in my head with David Sylvian's "Red Guitar". Anyway, when I listened to this album, that was the only track that really did anything for me. It got a little too guitar-solo-heavy for me, which I suppose I can understand, but the songs didn't stick with me. I did recognize something that probably turned into the guitar solo for Pete Townshend's "Give Blood" on one track, though...

The Fixx:Missing Links. I thought this might be a new album, and was willing to check it out, but it turns out it's just a rarities and remixes collection. Most of the rarities didn't do much for me, apart from an instrumental called "Crystal Ice Dub". The remix of "Red Skies" was interesting, though.

Colin Hay:Going Somewhere. That's the guy from Men At Work, who sang "Overkill" on the second-season opener of "Scrubs". I remember his first solo album, "Looking For Jack", which had a great song called "Hold Me" on it, with lots of backup singers and backing music and background sound effects. This album, which includes a couple of songs from that album, is all (re)done acoustic-style. Now while I don't mind the occasional acoustic song, in general I think that a whole album of it is just too much. You may know by now that I like music more than I like lyrics, though I like songs better than instrumentals as well. So this album felt a little bit too lightweight for me.

Pat DiNizio: Songs & Sounds. I've said it before--I loved the first Smithereens album, and then after that they just seemed to go straight to pot. "Green Thoughts" was uneven, and "11" and "Blow Up" were just unsalvageable. So I didn't really expect much from Pat DiNizio's solo album, and so I was pleasantly surprised. It's quite listenable, still with Don Dixon producing, and while it didn't have any truly great songs on it, it didn't have any of the lame stuff that marred the latter Smithereens albums either.

Various Artists: Free At Last Vol. 3. I love finding samplers like this--this was an HMV sampler from about 1993 or 1994. It was one of those things that probably should not, legally, have been in the library at all, but I won't tell if you won't. It had a fairly high success rate--out of about 20 tracks, I already had four or five of them, and I liked about eight or nine others. There was Chris Mars, former drummer for the Replacements, proving he could also play guitar; G.W. McLennan, formerly of The Go-Betweens, the band only critics liked(I've only ever seen them on samplers); His Name Is Alive, which I had previously avoided under suspicion they were Christian; Hothouse Flowers, from their third album, which I've never sought out; and other bands like Presence and Sand Rubies and Mind Bomb, that I'd never even heard of, so probably never made a splash. But it was an interesting listen.

Next time I'll get into my opinions of some of Tom's top albums of 2002. Just to show that great minds can, on occasion, think differently...

As for books, I've been reading Marie Jakober's The Black Chalice for a few days now, going pretty slowly. It's a historical fantasy, set in the early 1100's, just after the First Crusade, in Germany. One of my problems with it so far, I think, is that much of it comes from a first-person transcription by a person that I'm growing to really, really dislike. He's so totally clueless, and almost mindlessly devout Christian, that he gives all the Christians in the story a bad name. All the pagan and atheist characters are more sympathetic. So it's a bit loaded...and while I may agree with the book's general theme, it seems to be a bit heavy-handed. I mean, it's like trying to tar modern Christians with the same brush as twelfth-century ones. There are some commonalities, but come on.

I also, in an attempt to actually work through some of those nonfiction books I was complaining about earlier, picked up one I had started some time ago and never finished. It's called Cyberpunk, but it's not about cyberpunk--it's about computer criminals. The first part of the book, which I finished last weekend, was about a guy named Kevin Mitnick who, well, broke into a lot of computers, played around with Pacific Bell's phone service more or less at will, and only got caught when his own friend turned him in. The style is a bit hard to read, though, because it's not written like a novel--it's written like a huge newspaper article. The authors are so obviously journalists, and that's just how they write. Better than many scientists, but still a bit deadening to read. Hopefully they're not all like that...or else I'm going back to Isaac Asimov's science columns.

Also in there I read Lois McMaster Bujold's Mirror Dance. Back in 1994, when we bought memberships in the Winnipeg Worldcon, I read all of the Hugo nominees...except for that one, because I hadn't read most of the intervening books in Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series, and felt that I should. It won the award, and until now I wasn't sure if it should. It's been a long time since I read John Barnes's Mother of Storms, which had been my first choice, but I think it would have been pretty close. Miles spends a lot of time...offscreen...in the book, leaving his clone-brother Mark to take up the slack, and Mark's development as a character is really the central plot of the book. I hope to see more of him in future Miles books. (I've still got a few more to go...)

Then there was Janette Oke's Love's Enduring Promise. Oke's books are a little bit like Laura Ingalls Wilder's, in some ways, with the whole frontier setting; it's hard to tell, but I think the books are set in Canada, not the U.S. I read the first book in this series, Love Comes Softly, a few years ago, and then read her Seasons of The Heart tetralogy instead. Now I'm back to this one. (These are all really Nicole's books, not mine...) It's very strongly Christian, which is a bit unsettling at times, but also informative, as someone who just doesn't understand how such people think. And in some ways it also reminds me of my colony-world simulation, as the children grow up and get married to other grown-up children... I mean, it's just the way of the world, I know, but it's interesting to see it in the story like that. Especially when you have a family as complicated as this one--husband and wife both widowed, husband with daughter, wife with unborn son, and then three children together, as well as two fostered from a no-account neighbour when he decided to head further west. That's the stuff.

I'm considering changing my email address, being tired of sorting through spam. Nothing major, maybe just adding a "1" onto the end of my name. That'll be fairly easy for people to remember, hopefully.

Then what I want to do, see, is replace any direct "mailto:" links on my web pages with calls to a little javascript program that will add the "1" in(or otherwise parse an indirectly-specified address)and then use that as the destination address. Hopefully that won't be too easy for the spam-gatherers...

I haven't figured out how to do it yet, though. My knowledge of javascript is minimal, if not vestigial. I skimmed through the big book we've got at work, but my precise problem did not seem to turn up as one of their examples... So if anyone out there has an idea how that would work, let me know.

On to the countdown:

350. The Colourfield: Miss Texas 1967, from Deception

I love the Colourfield, with Terry Hall's sardonic voice and lyrics over beautiful pop melodies. This song is wistful, but I'm not quite sure about what. (Who was Miss Texas 1967, for one thing?)

349. Holly Cole Trio: Calling You, from Blame It On My Youth

Holly Cole pretty much sticks to cover versions, so I'm pretty sure this is not original to her, but she does a wonderful version of it. Aaron Davis's piano starts out haunting and then builds up speed to bring a sense of urgency to the climax of the song, just as Holly's vocals are starting to soar. There's a great video, too, full of surreal sepia images.

A quick search on allmusic.com has revealed that the song is from the 1988 film Bagdad Cafe, and was nominated for an Oscar. And, apparently, widely covered--Natalie Cole(no relation), Celine Dion, and Patti LuPone, among others. Now I have to check out at least some of those other versions to see how they compare...

If you think this sentence is confusing, then change one pig.

2003-01-27T21:55:00.000-07:00

I Could Make You Weep More Cheaply

I know it's shocking to post when I just posted the day before, but I saw The Monday Mission and thought it had interesting questions, so I'll do that one:

1. Do you care for poetry? Do you have a favourite poem? Care to share some of it?

I've never been much for poetry. I will almost always tend to like rhymed and metered verse over free verse, because sometimes it seems that everybody thinks they can write free verse, when in fact it's probably crap. Of course, it's easy to write doggerel as well, but then at least you have crap that rhymes.* Also, I just tend to have greater difficulty parsing poetic writing, compared to prose. I look at a paragraph, and I can read it quickly as a series of sentences...but a sequence of lines in a stanza will flummox me every time.

I do like a few poets, though. Because of early exposure to "Cats", I've always had a soft spot for T.S. Eliot, and I quite like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and, of course, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. There's also Ogden Nash, because he's often funny, occasionally Edgar Allan Poe, and Lewis Carroll(though I've never made it through "The Hunting of The Snark"). Maybe a few Robert Frosts. There's the occasional other one I've run across, but I'll go with "Prufrock" as my favourite.

I can quote a few lines, like "I grow old, I grow old/I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled", and of course "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each/I do no think they will sing for me". Both possibly paraphrased. I'm sure the rest of it is on the Net somewhere.

This doesn't count song lyrics, because IMHO those are different. Though there's a great poem read over the track "Upon This Earth" by David Sylvian, on his "Gone To Earth" album, which might count. A quick Google search(god, I love Google!)reveals that this is Robert Graves's "The Foreboding", and goes:

Looking by chance into the open window,
I saw my own self seated there
Gaze abstracted, furrowed forehead, unkempt hair.
I thought that I had suddenly come to die,
And to a cold corpse this was my farewell
Until a pen moved slowly on paper, and tears fell.

He had written a name, yours, in printed letters,
One word on which bemusedly to pore. [I always had trouble making out that line in the song...]
No protest, no desire; your naked name, nothing more.

Would it be tomorrow, would it be next year?
The vision was not false, this much I knew;
And I turned angrily from the open window, aghast at you.

Why never a warning, either by word or look,
That the love you cruelly gave me could not last?
Already it was too late,
The bait swallowed, the hook fast.

Yeah, that's the stuff. Maybe I need to listen to it read out loud more, or something.

2. What does it take to "rock your world"?

I'm not quite sure what this means, actually. Something that makes me feel really good, perhaps...? (Where's a Random House Unabridged Dictionary when you need one!) Taking that interpretation, let me say that listening to most of the songs in my top 20 would probably do it, sometimes literally. Reading a really good book, watching a really good TV show... But that's too general, isn't it? This question, I don't like that much. Ask what you mean.

3. Have you ever done anything that landed you in financial trouble? Has somebody else's action ever caused you financial ruin? What happened?

Well, the most dangerous thing, I think, was when we bought my dad's car. He had a '94 Mercury Topaz that he was getting rid of, and for some reason I had it in my head that he was offering it to us for $3000. Even when he sent us an official appraisal, showing us that it was worth $6500, we didn't clue in. We had scraped up $3000--at the time, we were renting a condo, I had been at Joseki about a year, and Nicole may have been working at Blockbuster Video--and then Dad asked, "Where's the rest?" Well, we agreed to pay him off in installments, but he needed the money too, and eventually we had to take out a bunch of money on our Visa to pay off the rest. It was our mistake, really.

And then, most annoyingly, a few months later, I think even before we'd finished paying Dad for it, I rear-ended a pickup truck on the way to work, and it ended up being a write-off. It wasn't even that badly damage--I would never had used the word "totaled" for it, but apparently a few too many things under the hood, like the air conditioning(which, on some days in our short hot summer, I would really like to have again), were broken. Luckily we got close to $6000 for it, and eventually bought the '92 Dodge Spirit that we are still driving. It's okay, but I still think Ford cars have better heaters.

At the time of the accident, I was in rehearsal for the Walterdale Theatre production of "Ivanov". In a fit of epimethean lack of foresight, we had decided, when insuring the '94 Topaz, to not get the "loss of use" coverage...which would have, basically, paid for a rental car for us until the car was fixed, or possibly even until we got a new one. So I got lots of rides(luckily, the director lived reasonably nearby), and rode the bus a bunch of times, because it took us weeks to be able to get around to car shopping, even once we had the money.

Nobody else has really done much to us, unless you count the cretin at Vectoron who fired me two months after hiring me just to keep me from working for a different department. After we had moved from Grande Prairie down to Edmonton for the job(at least they still paid for our move). But that still wasn't "ruin", just setback.

4. Take a stroll down memory lane. There is a song, that every time you hear it, you think of this one person. What's the song, who is the person, and what memories does it conjure up?

Oh, there are dozens of them. I tend to associate people with music, songs or entire albums. Julia comes up in my head whenever I listen to Danny Wilson's "Meet Danny Wilson", The Cure's "Head On The Door" or "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me", Malcolm McLaren's "Madam Butterfly", Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind", or The Nails' "88 Lines About 44 Women". Mike comes up when I listen to Tom Waits's "Bone Machine" or REM's "Monster". My brother has exposed me to so much music that it would be hard to pick just one, though Philip Glass would definitely do it. Trish turned me on to The Welfare $tarlets, and I remember seeing some more local people like Karl Roth and Bobby Cameron with her. Jody comes up with The The, Talking Heads' "Naked", Mike Oldfield's "Crises", "Five Miles Out", or "Q.E.2", anything by The Housemartins, or Shriekback's "Care". Jeremy--anything by Iron Maiden, among many others. Peter--Rush's "Hemispheres", "Signals", "Moving Pictures", or "Permanent Waves". Strange Advance makes me think of Kevin. Public Enemy's "She Watch Channel Zero" I remember a bunch of my brother's friends hanging out. Blue Peter's "Don't Walk Past" brings to mind a morning at my brother's waiting for him to wake up. T'Pau's self-titled album, and Club Nouveau's "Life, Love & Pain" make me think of Aaron Bielish, who recommended them to me. And so on. I have many associations for people I only know from the Net, where sometimes it's all that I remember about them...

5. Are there any occasions when you feel like you are missing out on something that everyone else seems to enjoy?

What, like reality TV? No, I already ranted about that one. In general, either I am grateful for all the time/money that I am saving compared to those poor slobs who watch sports/drink beer/whatever. Sometimes, if something gets popular enough without my being able to understand why, I will start to dislike it just on principle. That happened with "The X-Files", for instance. And when Jeremy, Dave and all their friends, even my brother at times, were obsessed with the game "Wing Commander".

I guess "Buffy" is the only thing I feel like I'm missing out on right now...I don't have the time to get into it, to even start watching it, but it sounds like something I would really enjoy.

6. What phrases "push your buttons" and why?

I'm pretty tolerant of these things, phrases and idioms. I try to be a descriptive grammarian, not a prescriptive one--not "Look what they're doing to the language now!" but "What an interesting new usage!" There are some "jokes" that really make me grit my teeth, though. Mostly they bug me because they rely on ignorance of etymology. Geeky, huh? A prime example is "If pro is the opposite of con, is progress the opposite of Congress?" Stand-up comedians come up with these things, and then everybody promulgates them. Or "Carpe Diem--seize the fish", which is just based on ignorance of Latin. (Though somehow "Illegitimi non carborundum--Don't let the bastards grind you down" doesn't bother me.)

I liked it in The Last Hero where Rincewind suggested their slogan should be "Morituri Nolumus Mori". Which is real, honest-to-god Latin for "We who are about to die do not wish to die."

7. Do you believe in life after death? What do you believe happens when our time is up?

At the moment what I believe is that there is little to no evidence for life after death...but it makes a whole lot of sense for people to postulate that there must be. For one thing, death is scary, and often seems senseless, or unfair. So to conclude, first, that death is not a real ending, that somehow life continues, is very reassuring, and so would be handy in that way. And then, of course, if you can use a "good" afterlife as a reward for a "good" life, and a "bad" afterlife as a punishment for a "bad" life, as judged by whatever moral precepts you happen to have, then you can make your meme complex really catch on.

Bonus Question: Everybody's talking all this stuff about me why don't they just let me live?

Probably because you're a public figure, which is tantamount to surrendering control over your privacy. Also, because you're a role model, you have to live to a higher standard than average anonymous people, because people look to you for cues on how to behave. That's probably at least part of it, but I'm sure there are many other reasons.

My wife and I often do the "Bacon chain" game, trying to link actors and actresses(or "actrons", as I like to call them generically)by way of the movies they've been in.

Tonight we tried something a little different--the "Endless Bacon Chain". In this, you start with an arbitrarily selected actron, and then try to see how long a chain you can make without duplicating an actron or a movie. So you could go, like:

1: Kurt Russell.
2: Madeline Stowe, from "Unlawful Entry".
3: Drew Barrymore, from "Bad Girls".
4: Steve Zahn, from "Riding In Cars With Boys"

Etc., until finally you give up because you've reached someone with no remaining links. Consulting reference materials is allowable, but only in positions of difficulty. We didn't keep count of the length of our chain, but we came up with a pretty damn long one. We missed a few people, like Keanu Reeves, but it's not a perfect system. We also managed to include four cast members from "Friends".

I've been working on my own little movie database, for work on Bacon Chain projects, like the standard chains, and the "Bacon box" proposed by Matt Enlow, where you select N actrons who have each starred in movies with each other. I talked about this one before, and am too lazy to go look up the reference. I think I managed to get a good set with Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, and possibly Rick Moranis all starring in movies with each other; other sets have proved more elusive, and I haven't gotten above four. But then, my database is far from complete. I wish I could just download it from IMDB, and winnow out the stuff I don't want. Maybe I should try to automate a program to do that...nah, too much work. I'm not that lazy.

Here are some of the foursomes I've got, anyway--you fill in the movies, if you want:

Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest, Jeff Goldblum, Peter Falk
Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel, Jon Lovitz, Steve Buscemi
Bill Pullman, Carrie Fisher, Tom Hanks, John Candy
Andie McDowell, Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Madeline Stowe
Joe Pesci, Kevin Costner, Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro
Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Tommy Lee Jones, William H. Macy
Ethan Hawke, Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, Robin Williams
Al Pacino, Christopher Plummer, Dennis Quaid, Ed Harris

I've got more, but those should do you for a start...

On to the countdown:

352. Queen: Funny How Love Is, from Queen II

When I listened to Queen albums a lot as a kid, I usually skipped the first two, since I didn't like them as much. I've still never really gotten into them, but this one song stuck with me. The lyrics are clever and catchy, and the sampled guitar work is pretty cool to listen to.

351. Brian Eno: The Great Pretender, from Taking Tiger Mountain(By Strategy)

This is one of those albums my brother got me to listen to(so is the above, for that matter), and I thank him for it. It's hard to pick out individual songs, but this one is a great combination of music and lyrics. I could probably do without the several seconds of electronic crickets at the end, though.

I'd like a Slow Comfortable Screw On The Beach With An Orgasm....