Hodgepodge

Fascinating, fun blog at the NY Times. Check out the latest installment, "Back to the Land".

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Unlike many of the people I know, I am not at Loscon, nor at OryCon, or even at SorcerorCon going on in its small way just a few miles from me. I'm taking the weekend off because I need the rest and because starting next Friday I start my five weeks on the road in Austin, Columbus, and Mehama.

My thoughts are with everyone I know who is at one of those conventions, and I hope y'all are having fun. But my body is here at home and I'm getting extra sleep, which I need rather urgently.

Annoying friends and strangers alike, 140 bytes at a time.

• 09:00 Happy Saturday, tweeps! Enjoying the last nice day here in KC for a while.... #
• 09:01 On the blog: Continuing the geekification of the next generation: bit.ly/4rgtJ1 #
• 09:11 I hate sites with pop-up ads on every page & loud audio plugins. What business model involves annoying the shit out of potential customers? #
• 18:28 Somebody's going to have to explain the rationale for our local CBS affiliate running an infomercial in primetime starting at 7pm. WTF? #
• 18:57 Reason #4,586,183 for putting a bowling ball through my TV: I'd no longer have to be subjected to the celebutard antics of Spencer Pratt. #
• 20:33 @tokyorca Re: Who's Spencer Pratt - That's pretty much the question I kept asking. #
• 22:43 Watching G.I. Joe on DVD, and I can fell miselph getink stoopider wit evry pasing moomunt..... #

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Trivia time!

Q: How many terrorist attacks occurred on US soil during the George W Bush administration?

A: Zero.

Source: Bush's former press secretary Dana Perino.

True. 9/11 and the anthrax letters all happened during Bill Clinton’s term. Or maybe it was Obama’s. Who cares? It’s Fox News, and 9/11 happened when THEY say it does.

Just shoot me,

This is dF

I was rather stretched for time back when New York, the GOP and America in general was freaking out over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 defendants being taken to New York to stand trial. Which is as well, as I was thoroughly baffled, bamboozled and perplexed by all the hoopla.

Well, let me put that another way. I wasn’t surprised by the hoopla. Hoopla is what America does best when it comes to Teh Terrorz. I just couldn’t get my head around the reasons behind the hoopla.

Because as near as I could tell, the main objections were (1) Bringing terrorists onto US soil is extremely dangerous, even if the terrorists are still in jail and (2) It’s especially dangerous to try them in a civilian court (even though that’s how we’ve tried every other terrorism case in the US in the entire history of the US) because OMG what if they WIN? Then terrorism will be legal and we’ll all DIE!

Neither of which makes even the slightest bit of sense to me. So I figured I must be missing something, and that I needed time to work through the details – which, as I said, I didn’t have back when the story broke.

Luckily, that worked out pretty well, because since then, the BlogoNet has done all the heavy lifting for me.

Glenn “Constitution Boy” Greenwald has a pretty good (albeit really long) summation of what Eric Holder has in mind, how it adds up to a case of very selectively applied Rule Of Law (in essence: we’re only going to use civilian courts for slam-dunk cases, and use military tribunals for the ones the DOJ might actually lose) and why that’s a bad idea (at least if you don’t want yr justice system to resemble North Korea’s).

If that’s too much work, Fafblog brilliantly sums up the whole Gitmo Terrorist-Storage Offshoring dilemma as “Schrodinger's Guilt”:


Exactly.

Order in the court,

This is dF

Current stats:

Words: 11,360.
Total words: 101,678.
Reason for stopping: I sort of, well, ran out of book.
Music: the Discount Armageddon play list.
Lilly and Alice: my lap and the orange cat tree, respectively.

First draft stats:

Pages: 353
Chapters: twenty-five, plus a prologue and an epilogue
Started: August 22, 2008
Finished: November 28, 2009

Given how much time this book spent being "lower priority" than things with actual deadlines, fourteen months is a very respectable time to get from beginning to end. Midnight Blue-Light Special should go a lot faster, if only because I completely understand my world now, and what it's supposed to be like. I know the rhythm, I know the beat, and I can dance to it. I am...I'm staggered right now. I've been saying for a few weeks now that I was probably going to finish the book this month, but there's a huge difference between saying and doing. I've done. Draft one is done.

Draft two is going to involve smoothing out the continuity, fixing the pacing, and generally book-doctoring like whoa...but it'll probably be done by the end of January at the very latest, and that's with taking a backseat to Blackout, which gets to take over as my primary book now. Discount Armageddon is done.

I'm amazed and a little off-balance. I am now going to go eat ice cream and watch TV.

So I’ve been to the movies. And I have a blog.

You see where this is going, don’t you?

Pandorum

Pandorum starts with a promising premise – two spaceship flight crew members wake up from suspended animation on a ship that appears to be dead. With no memory of their mission, they have to figure out what’s wrong with the ship – and what happened to the crew that was supposed to relieve them.

What follows, unfortunately, is a clunky mashup of Alien, Resident Evil and space-mission-gone-wrong films. The eventual explanation for what’s going on (which, incidentally, looks nothing like what the promo poster to the right implies) might have worked if the screenwriter put a little more thought into it (or been a little more consistent) or at least wrote dialogue clever enough to get the idea across. But he didn’t.

Still, probably the biggest weakness is the creature design. When yr doing a film like this, the secret is to come up with something iconic enough that stands out from the rest of the pack, something people will remember. Repurposing the leftover vampire costumes from I Am Legend is NOT a way to achieve this.

Fail.

Is there anybody out there,

This is dF

Patrick Stewart: the legacy of domestic violence

"Someone, somewhere, has attempted to make a vegetarian turducken."
---chris_walsh

According to the Muppet Wiki, there will be more music videos forthcoming akin to the one of "Bohemian Rhapsody" I posted about the other day. The others planned are "Dust in the Wind," "American Woman," "Popcorn," "Carol of the Bells," and "Stand By Me."

I am eagerly anticipating.....

Just got up about 45 minutes ago from a 3 - 3.5 nap.

I was feeling a little shaky and both over and under adrenalized.

Feeling better now, but not back to 100%.

We were planning to go to Costco and then I just got overwhelmed.

Costco domestic goodness shifted to tomorrow and laundry is now in production.

So current status is that I am hanging in there.

How are you guys doing today?

AmericaBlog turns us on to one of the stupidest arguments against health care reform yet:

... Let's just not pretend, as some healthcare reformers would have us do, that we can easily get more equality without paying the price in efficiency.

Put simply, the healthcare reform bill would make the United States more like western Europe. That may mean more security about healthcare, but it also means that future generations of Americans will likely spend more time enjoying leisure.

Because goodness knows efficiency is so very much more important than the health of your workers and their being able to enjoy some leisure time. I mean, it was right there in the Declaration of Independence -- "illness, wage-slavery, and the pursuit of efficiency".

Do any of these people ever look at anything in a way that doesn't involve bottom-line, short-term monetary profit?

1. I'm taking entries for the pet photography ARC giveaway through the end of the weekend. No horses, snakes, or hermit crabs yet, but I'm holding out hope!

2. There's a shiny new interview with me over at Book Love Affair, discussing the next two Toby books, the first of my books as Mira Grant (Feed), how I keep myself from spontaneously combusting, and various other topics of interest. I'm answering questions throughout the day, so please, swing by, and see if anything sparks your curiosity!

3. I'm going to be appearing December 12th in San Francisco as part of the Writers With Drinks series. To quote the website, "Writers With Drinks combines erotica with literature, stand-up comedy with science fiction and poetry with essays." The show is at The Make-Out Room (3225 22nd. St., San Francisco), from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM. The doors open at 7 PM. I don't know yet just how many drinks this writer will have, but if I have enough, my piece for the evening will probably be the full stand-up version of The Microwave Story. Be there!

4. In case that's not good for you (and it may not be, as not everyone is local to me), I'm also going to be doing a book reading/concert at the Wayward Coffeehouse in Seattle, on December 26th. Vixy and Tony are going to be there to help me blow the roof off, and there will be lots of other exciting goodies throughout the night. It's gonna be awesome.

5. I'm going to go finish Discount Armageddon now.

...and I think I want his job.

Although I question the state of his GI tract and cardiovascular system.

Still might be worth it.

;)

A little slice of metal history for you: Rob Halford of Judas Priest – on trial for using subliminal messages to convince fans to kill themselves – testifies by singing a lyric from the song "Better By You, Better Than Me".



The subsequent questioning (from his own lawyer) gives you an idea of just how bizarre the entire idea of the trial was – so much so that you wonder how it ever got to the trial phase in the first place.

But hey, that was 1990, which is practically the Stone Age when we all believed that thunderstorms were angry gods. Here in 2009, no one would ever believe that famous people speak in a way that contains Satanic evil messages if you were to hear it backwards –

Oh snap.

Anyway, here’s the best write-up you’ll find on the trial, if you’ve got about 30 minutes to kill.

Breakin’ the law,

This is dF

Continuing the geekification of the next generation....

Addy, playing with the Star Trek dollhouse action playset my mother bought for me her.

Click to enlarge.

"Daddy, they even got Shatner's toupee right!"

( ...a VERY Pop Culture-y Pun... )

( Saturday Strip-O-Rama... )

I’ve always been a night person. But while everyone else would spend their nights at the clubs and bars, you’d be more likely to find me in a coffee house full of beatniks in Hermosa Beach.



[Via Like ... Dreamsville]

Okay, I made that up. I’ve never been to Hermosa Beach, and by the time I discovered night life, coffee houses were way out of fashion.

Still, I never really took to the American bar scene (unless there was a decent band playing that night). I was more at home in all-night diners – which by 1990 in the mid-South meant mainly IHOP, Waffle House or Denny’s. Not exactly a Tom Waits song waiting to happen, but you know, you take what you can get.

Then I moved to Carbondale and discovered the Longbranch Coffeehouse, which worked hard to revive the old coffee-house vibe – not hard in a college town (unless the college town is Clarksville, TN, in which case you’ll get bars and strip joints and you’ll like it), but it was still a great place to get strung out on caffeine until midnight or so, when they kicked you out and you fled either to the Corner Diner or (last resort) Denny’s.

I liked it. I’d have moved in if they’d let me.

So yeah. Coffeehouses and all-night short order joints are my idea of nightlife. Sure, you miss out on fights and wet t-shirt contests. On the other hand, no one ever woke up hungover next to a horrid stranger after a late-night espresso binge. Sure, that’s probably because you never went to sleep in the first place. But you see what I’m saying.

Night owl,

This is dF

Comic Books + Comic Strips Mashup

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Work resumed today on Book Three of the current group. Washed some dishes. Moved stuff from other house back to here (some cook pots, etc.) Slept much of the afternoon.

Still tired.

I hadn’t planned on coming back to the Climate Change Email Hack, as I’d considered the matter basically closed. Granted, the “Global Warming Is A Big Conspiracy For No Good Reason Except Al Gore Is Evil” crowd will never let it go. But I figure that’s their problem.

But seeing as how Congressional Republicans have decided to probe the email hack to find out how much these scientists contributed to a widely cited UN report on climate change on which Obama bases his policies (see what they did there?), the story is going to have a lot more legs – and it’s going to be argued and played out on national television mainly by people who know dick about science and the science community.

So I thought I’d better pass on this nice piece from a PhD biologist adding some context to the whole “scientists arguing = no consensus on global warming = HOAX!” meme.

ABSTRACT


Too bad politics doesn't work the same way. Not these days, anyway.

Yes, I know. This won’t make a scrap of difference in the “probe”, and will make even less of a difference in the cable TV news arena.

But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be just as uninformed.

Queen of de Nile,

This is dF

Got two proposals out, one to an editor, one to my agent (the latter the revision of the mystery), and am 3/4 of the way through another proposal for the same editor. Also went to the Cloisters for the first time in ages, which was lovely as always.

Now I'm gonna watch my latest Netflix movie, Valkyrie, because I am Bryan Singer's bitch............

I was in no particular hurry this morning, so after a fairly leisurely breakfast and packing, it was back on the road to head back to Fremont. Traffic was a breeze. Even with a rest stop at Vacaville, it took less than three hours to get back home. There was heavy traffic going the other way while traversing Fairfield, though. Even with five lanes, that stretch of road didn't have enough capacity.

I was wearing a shirt that is covered with diesel locomotives of various sorts in a bunch of fallen-flag railroad paint schemes. As I was coming out of the restroom, one of the people who operates the miniature railroad on the Nut Tree grounds, wearing traditional steam-railroad engineer gear, commented on my shirt: "What, no steam trains?"

I said, "If they had one, I'd be all-electric." He had no answer for that.

Three hours driving isn't much. I've made much longer trips. At need, I could have avoided any hotel nights at all, doing Thanksgiving as an out-and-back trip on Thursday. But even taking things easy, I found myself feeling completely beat when I got home. I fell into bed and napped for 90 minutes or so. I'm still feeling pretty groggy. To those of you at SorcererCon this weekend: Sorry, but I'm spending the weekend dead (mostly) for rest purposes. I'll have to go out a couple of times (I forgot to buy a larger memory card for my camera when I got the new hard drive, and I'll need more storage if I'm to record the Fannish Inquisition, for instance), but otherwise, I really want to rest this weekend before the marathon ahead of me in December.

Zombie Outbreak Simulator

Tweak the settings and find out how fast the world gets overrun.

Life is meaningless and full of pain.

Suddenly it seems a thousand years ago when the G-Men were 5-0 and dominating. What the hell happened? Clearly I can't leave the country during football season. My teams just seem to fall apart without me.