One Hand Clapping

I HAVE A NEW BLOG AT A NEW SITE

2010-06-08T08:38:00.000-06:00

DUE TO THE ONGOING PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH GOOGLE ANALYTICS WHICH HAVE PREVENTED ME FROM EDITING OR POSTING TO MY OWN BLOGS ON BLOGGER USING MY HOME COMPUTERS, I HAVE SET UP A NEW BLOG AT

http://sanddreamingofstars.wordpress.com/

IN ADDITION TO POSTING NEW MATERIAL, I'M SELECTING MY FAVORITE BITS FROM THE OTHER TWO BLOGS AND GRADUALLY MOVING THEM OVER, RATHER THAN JUST PORTING EVERYTHING OVER.

I'VE ALSO BEEN EDITING THE MATERIAL THAT I'VE REPOSTED TO MAKE IT SHORTER AND TIGHTER, EXCEPT FOR STORIES.

THE EMPHASIS OF THE NEW SAND DREAMING OF STARS BLOG IS ON BOOK REVIEWS, POEMS, VIGNETTES, AND STORIES. NO POLITICS, NO TWITTER-ESQUE OR FACEBOOK-STYLE PERSONAL UPDATES, NO STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. I'D LIKE TO POST ONLY MATERIAL THAT I'VE GIVEN SOME THOUGHT TO AND EDITED AT LEAST ONCE.

I'M ALSO GOING TO BE EMBEDDING LINKS AT THE BOTTOM OF POSTS, RATHER THAN THROUGHOUT, TO TRY AND AVOID THE DISTRACTION THAT STUMBLING OVER A LINK IN THE MIDDLE OF A SENTENCE AND DECIDING WHETHER TO CLICK IT OR NOT CAN CAUSE.

Google Analytics Has Killed All My Pages

2010-06-05T14:02:00.000-06:00

I'm writing this using Internet Explorer on the Acer of Doom, our only (currently) functioning Windows system, because I can no longer update blog posts using Safari, Firefox, or Google Chrome, because Google Analytics, which I enabled for both my blogs and my google site web page, is causing an error. I can't even load the web site; I was unable to update the blogs, IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT I DELETED THE GOOGLE ANALYTICS CODE FROM THE TEMPLATE AND DELETED ALL THREE SITES FROM THE GOOGLE ANALYTICS PAGE.

I should be able to view and modify my own work, but I can't and haven't been able to for days. No warnings from Google, no useful advice at all on how to deal with the problem, nada. On a level of one to ten, I'm at an eight or nine. Someone else has basically taken control of my content by taking it out of my hands due to a technical glitch. I don't know how to fix it, only that I've wasted two hours today already looking into it.

This is how technology works, or fails to work. It promises you all sorts of added functionality, then bombs out on providing even the basic stuff. And then it calls to you to waste your time or alter your behavior just so you can try to keep it running.

Book Review: The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

2010-06-03T11:45:00.000-06:00

The Lost Books of the Odyssey purports to be a collection of lost stories from Homer's Odyssey, all of which are variants on the events in the "official" version of the epic tale. It also claims to be a novel, right there on the cover.

Neither of these claims are true. The book was a remarkable read, however, filled with beautiful and thought-provoking imagery. It's a new book, I have to turn it back in soon, but I've held onto it in case I want to read through one of the stories again.

If you like Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Paulo Coehlo, perhaps some Stanislaw Lem, I think you'll like Zachary Mason. He has the same deft magic realist touch, the imagination that is both vivid and thoughtful, and a way of crafting brief passages that draw you into a mood and setting with ease.

Why isn't a novel? Well, I think the simplest explanation I can offer is that if you can pick up a book and start reading any chapter at random without feeling as though you missed anything that came before or learned anything that helps you understand the events described in following chapters, then that book doesn't have a narrative structure that you can consider a novel. It is so unlike a novel that I don't know why they bothered with the label at all.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a collection of vignettes, pastiches, contemplations, or what have you on the underlying themes of the Odyssey, a re-imagining of many different scenes, several of them more than once, as well as a depiction of many different possible individuals named Odysseus. It's quite hard to describe, yet I think you can pick up a copy, read one of the shorter chapters that is just one or two or three pages in length, and come away with a sense of how the entire project feels. You can sample the first two chapters by clicking the Look Inside option at the other end of the Amazon link above.

Book Review: The Trade of Queens

2010-06-03T11:27:00.000-06:00

The Trade of Queens is the sixth and supposedly concluding book in the Merchant Princes series. If you haven't read the earlier books, this one will confuse the hell out of you, regardless of all the efforts to update people on the plot. I found those little summaries of what has happened so far useful to keep up and I've read the other five novels, just not in a short span of time.

Essentially it's a very well thought-out, highly realistic story of alternate worlds whose events and conflicts hinge largely upon differences in economics, politics, social customs, and concepts of law. That sounds dry, but the story isn't--it moves at breakneck speed, with a large cast of characters. Stross does a really nice job of delineating the differences a subtly different America circa 2003, the Norse colonized Gruinmarkt of the world-walking Clan, and the world of New Britain.

I'm particularly impressed at how smoothly Stross moves through complicated nomenclature and jargon within various subcultures. It's a fun series and this is a decent novel, but as my comment above might suggest, Stross has SO many balls up in the air at this point, so many plotlines going on multiple worlds, that this actually feels a bit rushed and doesn't feel that much like the series has ended. By the standards of some of the earlier cliffhangers in the series, this one wraps up, but there's still so much left to be decided.

I also feel the book suffers from Stross resolving too many of the conflicts that he poses too quickly; there isn't enough time for the tension to really build in many cases. The series is still well worth a read, in my view, and if you do you'll eventually want to know how some of the major plotlines pan out, which is the goal of this novel.

Book Review: The Yard Dog by Sheldon Russell

2010-06-03T11:24:00.000-06:00

The Yard Dog is a mystery set in the area surrounding a Nazi prisoner of war camp in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma during WW II. Thousands of Nazi prisoners were brought to the US during the war and held in such camps. The main characters include Hook Runyon, a one-armed railroad detective (or "yard dog"), Runt Wallace, a young man with a twisted spine and legs, Dr. Reina Kaplan, a Jewish academic in charge of the program aimed at reeducating the Nazis while they are being held, and a number of other eccentric folks.

The plot revolves around Hook's efforts to investigate the death of a mentally challenged bum who lived around the railyards. As far as mysteries go, the clues build up very slowly and rather haphazardly, with different characters coming across bits of evidence, so the plot drifts a bit, even though the book isn't that long. The payoff is pretty good, but the journey there doesn't build up as much suspense as I would like. Sometimes the narrative voice explaining the thoughts in the characters' heads feels a little forced and cliched as well.

But the dialogue just crackles off the page, quick-witted and very believable, and the period setting is sketched out with sharp, sure details that really bring it to life. Though I lived many years in Texas and have absolutely no love for Oklahoma, it was really engaging. I genuinely liked many of the key characters by the time the story was finished. Another read I stumbled across just by browsing the shelves in the public library, and I'm glad I did.

Its implied that this will be the first in a series of stories about Hook Runyon and I'll look for sequels, on the assumption that plotting is something that an author can get a little sharper with, but establishing a voice and creating an engaging setting are good skills to build upon. Plus, the idea of Hook, who lives in a caboose, traveling to some different period locales doing his work for the railroad has promise, as long as Russell keeps his focus on some of these lost stories and places from the time.

My Superhero RPG site

2010-06-02T13:17:00.000-06:00

Been spending a bunch of my free time lately working on material for an original superhero setting, adapted to the new superhero roleplaying game ICONS.

You can check it out here if so inclined.

Comics I've Read in 2010

2010-05-28T16:47:00.000-06:00

Graphic Novel section [17 total]
[EDIT- added Angel: After the Fall and Invincible Iron Man: The Five Nightmares]

Angel: After the Fall by Joss Whedon, Brian Lynch, and Franco Urru. [Whedon was the co-plotter here, but the writing is mainly Lynch, as I understand it. For fans of the Angel TV series, which itself was a spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this comic series continues the storyline, which ended with the beginning of a huge battle between all the demonic forces of Wolfram and Hart and Angel and his surviving buddies. I found it kind of disappointing, to be honest. It continues the trend seen in the Buffy comics of throwing in effects and scale at a level beyond what the TV budget would allow for, which is fine as far as it goes, but everything here is a bit too chaotic. They've made big changes to several of the main characters, completely altered the setting by dropping the city of Los Angeles into a Hell Dimension, and they start in media res and take a long time to explain just what's going on. Every chapter (representing an issue) seems to end on a different, shocking cliffhanger/revelation, and by the end of the graphic novel, which also ends in that fashion, I was a bit jaded. There's some snappy dialogue, but I felt as though a lot of stuff got changed just for the sake of changing it. To be honest, this was a problem with the television series as well in its last two seasons, where they made a LOT of weak character decisions and dubious transformations. So if you're a completist, pick this up, but be prepared to need the other volumes almost immediately to make any sense of what's happening.]
The Boys, Vol. 1: The Name of the Game by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson [I'm not linking to any of these books as I wouldn't want to encourage anybody to read them. :-)]
The Boys, Vol. 2: Get Some
The Boys, Vol. 3: Good for the Soul
The Boys, Vol. 4: We Gotta Go Now [I checked out all four of these volumes at once at the recommendation of a librarian who I talk to sometimes who has suggested some good reads in the past. These weren't among them. Short story: self-indulgent grossness for the sake of grossness, paper-thin commentary on celebrity, laughable pretense at serving the public, nothing worthwhile that hasn't been done better in other series with vastly more taste. I have a hard time believing that this series continues or that these have actually been popular enough to reissue in hardcover. Longer review here. Now I just have to figure out what to say to the librarian if he asks me what I thought of these, because he is a nice guy.]
Brit by Robert Kirkman [meh, a lot of action, a couple unusual characters but everything feels really rushed, didn't excite me.]
Checkmate/Outsiders: Checkout by Greg Rucka and Judd Winick. [Got this crossover for my birthday. A fun read, but a bit confusing because while I've read all the Checkmate titles that sandwiched around this story, I haven't seen the Outsiders stories that immediately preceded it, just the early Outsiders stuff, and the makeup and dynamic of the team had clearly changed a bit in the interim.]
Crisis on Infinite Earths by Wolfman and Perez [Not good, the writing feels very, very dated and melodramatic, but the art by George Perez is great and I had fun reading this with Will.]
Gotham Central Volume 1: In the Line of Duty, written by Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker, art by Michael Lark. [Really good stories about the police in Gotham who have to deal with cases related directly and obliquely to all the costumed criminals, as well as not knowing what the Batman is up to.]
Gotham Central Volume 2: Half a Life. [The story in this graphic novel won an Eisner, I believe. It tells the story of detective Renee Montoya, her public outing as a lesbian, and her dealing with false charges of murder.]
Gotham Central Volume 3: Unresolved Targets. [A great and chilling story involving the Joker terrorizing Gotham that I have to think influenced the plot of The Dark Knight movie, followed by a good story involving the Mad Hatter and disgraced cop Harvey Bullock.]
Gotham Central Volume 4: The Quick and the Dead. [I liked the opening story about a corrupt forensic specialist selling supervillain related crime scene paraphenalia online a little better than the following story involving little used villain Dr. Alchemy, but the very Hannibal Lector-esque take on Alchemy was fun to read if not entirely original.]
Gotham Central Volume 5: Dead Robin [The final collection of the series. The title story, which comes first, is very interesting and plays off an interesting fact--when dead teenagers dressed up as Robin start appearing, no one on the police force has any way of knowing if any of them are the real Robin. They don't even know if there are multiple Robins. The wrap-up story carries the character arc of detective Renee Montoya through to its sad but seemingly inevitable conclusion, and features a death that made me sad, as I'd come to like the lost character. The end to a good series.]
Invincible Iron Man: The Five Nightmares, by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larocca. [Wow. I was very impressed by this collection of the first six issues of the recent Iron series. The writing is sharp, the high-tech future intriguing, and the character of Tony Stark presented in a very interesting fashion. The storyline deals with the things that Stark fears most happening in the world, with the most significant being that a supertech terrorist has figured out how to modify his Iron Man technology and improve it in some ways. I don't quite buy the idea that young Ezekiel Stane is able to generate the power that he does just by converting his body's energy more efficiently, even as he's chugging thousands of calories. I could see him having extraordinary reflexes, getting smarter, and so forth, but powering energy bolts that can hurt Iron Man seems extreme given the rationale. But it's a sci-fi superhero, right? Salvador Larocca's art is fantastic, Fraction's pacing is wonderful, and he finds interesting new ways to torment one of comicdom's most tormented icons. Good stuff that had me searching my library for the next volume. Which, alas, they don't have!]
Low Moon by Jason. [A collection of brightly colored, largely silent cartoon panels that display odd twists on familiar themes and a very quirky sense of humor. Did not surprise me to find out that the creator is Norweigian. There's a very Scandanavian sense of melancholy and dry humor running throughout these stories. Very interesting and worth a look if only to see how much story and characterization can be packed into such a minimalist presentation.]
Sleeper Vol. 1: Out in the Cold by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.
Sleeper Vol. 2: All False Moves
Sleeper Vol. 3: A Crooked Line
Sleeper Vol. 4: The Long Way Home [These somewhat disturbing graphic novels are the best combinations of noir, crime, and superhero storytelling out there. Double agent Holden Carver, whose unwanted superpower serves to alienate him from his own body and the world around him, gets stranded in a criminal organization when his handler is shot and left in a coma. These aren't your standard supervillains, though their leader, Tao, is a classic evil mastermind in many ways. Carver is constantly pushed into situations where he has to choose between duty, friendship, and survival, and every choice he makes seems to push him deeper into trouble. He has no good choices concerning who to trust. By the end, it's less a matter of wondering if he can get free and more a matter of wondering what the collateral damage to Carver and those around him is going to be. Riveting stuff, well illustrated by Phillips. There's some sex and violence that goes beyond what I typically consider tasteful or necessary, but it doesn't feel gratuitous in Brubaker's hands--there are moral and personal consequences for actions, and material that feels dark is presented as such. So superior to the Ennis crap above that the comparison between the two on one of the book covers made me want to puke. The books have been collected into two volumes, Sleeper Season 1 and Sleeper Season 2, which are the affordable ways to pick them up.]
Squadron Supreme by Mark Gruenwald [A classic that still holds up, filled with many plot twists and turns and a ton of difficult decisions for the characters that one didn't see in comics at the time.]

Books I've Read in 2010

2010-05-28T11:50:00.001-06:00

May
Fiction

The Yard Dog by Sheldon Russell. [A good book. Review here.]
The Trade of Queens by Charles Stross. [Not as good as the first few books in the Merchant Princes series, and feels a bit like it rushes to the ending. Longer review here. ]
The Kingdom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming. [A very unusual story centered on an equally odd romance between a mechanic from Idaho who is helping to build the brand new New York subway system and a princess/mathematical prodigy from the Kingdom of Toledo, which may or may not have ever existed. Edison, Tesla, and J.P. Morgan all make appearances. The novel blends a bit of urban history with colonial history mixed liberally with totally made up history from a closely parallel world, complete with sections replete with thorough footnotes to sources that might or might not exist. There's also a very vaguely described deus ex machina involving instantaneous travel through time, space, alternate universes, or possibly all of the preceding. It's a strange, confidently written novel that kept me turning the pages. As literary fiction with a touch of the fantastic cloaked as weird science, it works. As literary science fiction, it fails, mainly because it's incoherent as to the causes and effects of its central plot devices. So your level of enjoyment will probably be colored by what you're expecting to read. I was in the mood for something odd yet mainstream, so I enjoyed it. I think the faux history sections helped with that; they break up the momentum of the narration a bit, but are very cleverly done.]
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay [Another poetic, epic, and deeply engaging Kay novel, this one set in a fantastic version of the Tang Dynasty in China. It begins with the middle son of a decorated general in the midst of carrying out the task he has chosen to mourn his father's passing: burying the thousands of dead soldiers (from both sides of the conflict) left untouched for many years at an isolated mountain battlefield at the very edge of the Empire. This unusual act draws attention to him, that, combined with less dramatic events in his past and the ties of his family to the Imperial Court, changes his life, and the course of the Empire itself, irrevocably. Highly recommended.]
The Last Guardian of Everness by John C. Williams. [An epic fantasy that mixes the modern-day with an everything and the kitchen sink compilation of mythologies, folklores, and legends. The world is about to be overwhelmed by the Dark Lord of the Dreaming. The last guardians of the old order are the only ones who can stop it, but to do so they're supposed to bring about the end of the world. As you might guess, this leads to some hesitation. Can be a little confusing at times, but has lot of interesting imagery. The way in which so many different mythological elements are blended together is intriguing. And the sense of how the passage of time and the simple human capacity to forget can erode the power of those who were once legendary. Ends on a total cliffhanger, with the fate of the world literally in the balance. A really powerful imagination at work here.]

Nonfiction

April
Fiction

The War in 2020 by Ralph Peters. This book is now nearly 20 years old, so its predictions of future conflict involving a still solvent Soviet Union, a white-controlled South Africa, and a militaristic Japanese economic powerhouse all seem quite dated in some respects. In others, such as its depiction of the threat posed by the warmongering tendencies of various ethnic, nationalist, and fundamentalist Islamic factions in Central Asia, the collapse of order in Mexico, the tension between needing high-tech solutions to battlefield problems and the need for trained and dedicated soldiers to implement them, and social disruption at home, it seems eerily prescient. Not a book that glorifies combat or warfare, but one that does laud the honor and sacrifice of those who fight for their country. More nuanced and better written than much military fiction, though the female characters fall pretty flat.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin. [Intriguing and engaging first novel, a fantasy about gods, power, and family politics. The world is ruled by a single family due to the fact that they were the chosen of the Sky God, who won a terrible war with the two other founding deities of his pantheon, killing one and enslaving the other and all his children. So this family holds its power through the simple fact that it has bound gods and demi-gods into its service. At the same time, one must be very careful how to unleash their power. A young woman whose mother, once the heir apparent, was exiled from the family for marrying beneath her station, receives a sudden summons to the Court after her mother's death and is named one of three potential heirs. The rest of the novel is her struggle to understand the true history of the god war, to survive her encounters with her relatives and the enslaved gods, and to understand her true place in the world. An understatement to say that the final transformations involved are quite dramatic.]

Nonfiction

Young adult books on the Maya, Aztec, and Inca.
Yellow Smoke, a book on how technology and changing geopolitics have impacted the status and goals of the modern American Army. Perhaps a bit too sanguine in its assessment of how technology will supplant the fighting and killing role of ground forces, who will be transformed from primary fighters to recon units who target enemy forces for destruction by a wide array of weapons platforms operated remotely or fired from a great distance. But a lot of interesting insights into how the U.S. military system works and how it could be improved over time.

March
Fiction

A Gentleman's Game by Greg Rucka. [A well-paced, engrossing espionage novel based on the characters and situations from Rucka's black-and-white Queen and Country comic series. This tale is about an MI-6 Special Ops agent named Tara Chace who is given the assignment to assassinate a prominent imam with suspected ties to a terrorist attack on London. Does a good job of showing how complicated and dangerous the job can be when almost everything goes right according to the plan, because of the politics that emerge when the U.S., British, Israeli, and Saudi Arabian governments are all involved.]
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. [A Young Adult novel that deals with the very serious themes of how civil rights, technology, and national security can intersect with frightening results in the age of terrorism. I read nearly the entire book in one day on my iPod Touch. Some pretentious British jackass who teaches literature poo-pooed this book's Hugo nomination as an example of dumbed-down pap dominating the awards. But this book was very engaging.]

February [6 completed]
Fiction

Counting Heads by David Marusek. [See my lengthy review of this interesting but flawed science fiction novel.]
Mainspring by Jay Lake. [An enjoyable steampunk fantasy about a young man on a quest to repair the mainspring that turns the brass clockworks of an Earth in a literal clockwork universe. I liked the first half of the novel better than the second, and the ending was a bit mystical for my tastes, but overall it was a fun read.]
Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon. [Not a dazzling novel, but a well-crafted and well-written story that doesn't play games with the reader or try to impress us with metaphysics. I enjoyed it and have already checked out the sequel. Longer review here.]

Nonfiction

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon [Another great collection of essays about writing and fiction that filled with me wonder and envy. My reading habits and experiences with writing courses in college seem to have paralleled Chabon's very closely, but his drive and talent created light years of distance in the final result.]
Supercapitalism by Robert Reich [A decent look at how the growth of corporations has undermined the democratic process. Essential argument is that corporations in the global marketplace maximize benefits to consumers and investors but ignore the needs of citizens, all the while growing more involved in the political arena to the detriment of our good as a society and a democracy. Does a nice job in showing how we got to this point since World War I. Falls flat in prescriptions for change: limit corporate spending on politics (a goal nullified by the recent, obnoxious Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) and stop the legal fiction of treating corporations as individuals.]
Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein [This slim volume attempts to illustrate some of the essential concepts of various philosophical thinkers through the use of jokes whose humor is based on those concepts. It's funnier than my description makes it sound. Not sure that I have a deeper grasp of philosophy, but I did laugh at a fair number of the jokes.]

January [2 completed]
Fiction

Lamentation by Ken Scholes [Impressive novel blending sci-fi and fantasy.]

Nonfiction

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon [Great collection of essays about being a son, father, and brother.]

The Blame Game

2010-05-27T14:34:00.001-06:00

The previous post was triggered in part by an annoying exchange that I had with some friend of a former coworker, who decided to jump into the midst of a conversation about Texas governor Rick Perry throwing around the word "secession" like a drunken Confederate at a states' rights rally and mock the intellectual merits of a sarcastic comment I had made. In the process he made repeated references to "The State," apparently hoping that such initial capitalization would impress upon the rest of us how threatening and neo-fascist/communist/totalitarian the Obama administration is.

I asked the guy where his outrage against the impositions of The State had been while the Bush administration was busy declaring two wars, wiping out a budget surplus, running up deficits, trying to legislate personal behavior, castrating regulatory functions, expanding executive power (with no checks), and pushing for legislation to curtail civil liberties. Because he only seemed to be concerned about the current administration and all the terrible things it has done, with the last eight years an apparent wisp of imagination.

I also asked if it had been The State that caused the financial crisis that kicked off the recession.

He ignored the first set of questions, but to my surprise, he answered the second with a lengthy (by Facebook standards) explanation that Clinton had caused the financial crisis by making it too easy for banks to make bad loans, nay, pressuring them into making bad loans by promising them TARP bailouts.

Wow.

This is the point where I ended my participation in the discussion by congratulating the guy on his upcoming post as Minister of Propaganda should the revolution ever come.

But I did want to take up his point, because I believe that the initial facts he stated are, more or less, true: Clinton did approve of an easing on regulations and reassured banks that the federal government would bail them out. Its his entire interpretation of this as somehow meaning that liberal big government is to blame for the financial crisis that is ludicrous.

First and foremost, note how he easily absolves the private financial sector of all blame for making all the absurdly risky subprime loans in the first place. Not only are they to blame for incompetence, they are morally culpable for their actions. The heads of these companies made a huge amount of money up front from accepting commissions on huge deals involving financial instruments that were crap.

At places like Goldman Sachs, people were shorting the same investments (ie, betting that they would fail) they were telling other investors were safe and low risk. These people are still rich and still around, even if their companies are not. The government had nothing to do with the choices these business leaders made to game the markets by creating suspect financial instruments specifically designed to elude existing regulatory statutes, all to satisfy their own greed.

(And this is supposed to increase my faith in the free market and my trust that business can regulate itself? Really?)

Secondly, note how he implies that Clinton, and thus Democrats, and thus liberals, crafted and implemented this plan in a vacuum, bearing sole responsibility. So nobody in the financial markets was lobbying to get the government to make things easier on them? The Republican Congress played no role in trying to ensure that certain instruments, like derivatives and credit swaps, were not regulated? And Bush didn't push for further deregulation during his administration? The impetus for all of this came directly from one party in government, such that The State is to blame for everything?

Does that make any sense based on even a rudimentary understanding of how lobbying, PACs, and conservative pro-business politicians in this country operate?

You can go here to learn more about how the Office of Thrift Supervision, the federal agency in charge of regulating failed financial giant AIG, went shopping for AIG and other big clients in 2003 by pledging to slash regulations and oversight and let business do business.

That happened in 2003.

Clinton did sign the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 into law before George W. Bush took office, and that act did basically create a bunch of loopholes for the financial markets to operate in. I'll just note that (a) the Republicans controlled both the House and Senate in the 106th Congress that passed the bill and (b) again, these things don't just appear out of a vacuum. A bunch of legislators didn't get together and craft a complex plan to cater to select corporate interests without being asked to do so and having mock legislation drafted on their behalf by those corporate interests.

I don't think that the federal government is flawless. Far from it. But it pisses me off to have conservative jackasses like this Facebook fellow barge in spouting facts and figures while pretending that big government and the bailout of corporate America are solely representative of liberal, Democratic administrations. Because that's crap. Bush was not only in favor of a bailout, he signed it into law.

And beyond the political posturing involved in closing one eye and holding your nose so that you can attempt to blame everything on a single party, how about this "it's all the government's fault" reasoning?

First off, how the hell does anybody with half a functioning brain look at the events that precipitated the financial crisis and presume that the government caused it to happen and that big business doesn't share the bulk of the blame for its own actions? I thought conservatives were big into accountability?

And secondly, if the federal government was to blame for contributing to the bailout, their greatest failure was not in "pressuring" banks to make stupid and reckless loans and investments, but in failing to regulate the financial markets. How does that become an argument for a government with less authority?

Anyway, Facebook is a terrible medium to try to hold a cogent exchange on such a topic, and the cherrypicking of facts and questions that this guy indulged in, much less his interpretations, made it pretty clear to me that I didn't give a shit what he thought. But that doesn't mean I didn't think about why I thought he was wrong, and when I do that, sometimes it just helps to write it down and purge the system.

Facebook Not So Hot

2010-05-27T12:26:00.017-06:00

I have to say, I'm less interested in Facebook every day. I'm generally pretty bored by what I see posted there and I rarely think of anything particularly interesting that I'd like to share. (And even when I do, I rarely get any responses from people.)

The character count limits, while not as onerous as those on Twitter (where I opened an account and then immediately lost interest), tend to make it difficult to establish a point or provide a reference.

The whole collecting "friends" aspect so dilutes the meaning of the concept of friendship that it's almost offensive to me. Acquaintances? It feels neither very social nor like a network. I've gotten more connection through the random process of discovering someone's email and sending them a message than anything else. It might be useful for establishing initial contact with people, but it sustains nothing.

In fact, the most irritating moments I've had on Facebook are when I comment on the post of someone I know and one of their "friends" who is a complete stranger to me replies to my words with something asinine or snarky. It's very jarring, as though someone interrupted a conversation at a dinner party with a rude comment. I've had this happen on forums before, but the truncated format of Facebook seems to make the intrusions more likely to be off-point or misinterpreted.

And frankly, on forums people tend to ignore what I post anyway. But I've gotten asshole know-it-all conservatives, teabagger apologists, and even an alternative music snob passing judgment on comments I made in passing. At the least the music snob was just expressing a snotty opinion; the teabaggers and their ilk are simply completely full of shit, repeating their talking points and trying to sound rational or empirical while pretending they can't hear all the rabid screaming from the right that expresses the true sentiments of the movement they're defending.

Even if there was a way to have a rational conversation on certain political subjects with these people, and these days it seems that there isn't much chance of that, Facebook is a godawful medium to try to have a meaningful discussion, with its parameters limiting input to the comfortable confines of regurgitated sound bites. Plus, these people are apparently friends of other people I know, which eliminates the fall-back option of telling them to fuck off if they get too strident. I don't know, maybe I'm too picky, or I'm isolated or I avoid confrontation or I'm more like my family than most people, but over the years I've just blown off the people who are so far on the other side of the ideological fence from me that we can barely hear each other unless we shout. It kind of amazes me who pops up as friends of friends.

I think the lesson here is that I tend to be happier when I spend limited time online in general and less involved in social networking. So I'm going to start thinking about setting some time limits. Perhaps composing some of these blog entries or my web site updates while offline would be smart.

Purgatory Lost

2010-05-26T13:25:00.000-06:00

I had a dream the other night after watching the series finale of Lost, in which, in complete contradiction of the advertising campaign, all my questions were not, in fact, answered. Not even close.

Which came neither as a surprise nor as a letdown, really, because by the sixth season of the show the writers had introduced and then abandoned so many dangling plot lines that there was no hope that they would ever resolve anything.

Lost was interesting as a kind of hybrid between an actual dramatic television show with a discernable story arc and a crowd-sourced meta-media program that had the bulk of its presumed depth bestowed upon it by the feverish imaginings of its fandom rather than by the conscious efforts of its creators.

Whereas most writers try to communicate the content of the plot, by the second season the crew of Lost seems to have focused their efforts on obfuscation. The establishing of mysteries became vastly more significant than their resolution, with new mysteries being introduced whenever the current ideas simply ran out of gas, with no tangible effort at providing clear, consistent, or meaningful answers.

As time passed, this lack of coherence was labeled by many as sophistication. And in some ways, I think it was. After all, real life offers few concrete answers to its greatest enigmas.

The ideas of examining the paths not taken or of reexaming familiar events from multiple perspectives are interesting literary and philosophical devices that Lost returned to again and again. However, for the most part the show dealt with these concepts in the most shallow and inconsistent of ways. Changes were introduced for the sake of shock or some basic inability to ever complete anything. Let's go back in time! Let's have a parallel universe! Let's suddenly tack on an incoherent and rather flabby, lifeless mythology in the final season!

It's as if the show's creators were absolutely terrified of making any narrative choices.

At the same time, Lost had many wonderful characters and characterizations. It was by far the strongest element of the show. The writers seemed to have recognized this, to the extent that they began introducing new characters the way they introduced new mysteries, hoping that by adding and adding to the already brimming pot they would somehow end up with stone soup.

In the end, Lost ended up being an odd hybrid for me of very poor plotting mixed with generally interesting characterization, of storytelling that could trigger emotional reactions without satisfying me intellectualy at all. I watched all six seasons of the show, though by the last three years I wasn't really hooked. Would I recommend it to anybody who hadn't seen an episode before? Probably not.

Back to that dream.

In my dream, the original plane crash survivors found themselves on an eerie island. They interacted with inhabitants who didn't seem to be quite human and who formed different groups. One of these groups was very Taoist, another very scientific, another religiously dogmatic. We got repeated flashbacks into the pasts of individual characters as they tried to understand their environment and survive encounters with the strangeness around them. They even encountered a small group of people living on the beach, with whom they had confused interactions. None of these extras became major characters on the lines of Linus or Juliet. It was a dream, and none of these interactions were all that coherent.

Eventually, after certain encounters with the things on the island, we started getting different flashbacks, in which key characters relived events we'd already seen, but making different choices and experiencing different outcomes. Some of the beings from the island appeared in these new flashbacks. No time travel to the 1970s. No flash-forwards. Sometimes it seemed that the island contained passageways to other places in the world. There was a fair amount of suffering, but nobody ever seemed to die--those that did would reappear later.

In the end, it was revealed that all the main characters on the show were dead and that the island was a kind of spiritual purgatory where their souls were tested; they had to confront their greatest hopes and fears, to relive key moments of their lives and examine their choices. Some of the beings on the island were souls unable to move on, while others were caretakers and cryptic guides of a sort.

The show ended when rescue came for the Others on the beach, who were the actual survivors of the crash and who interacted with the main characters in dreams or by seeing them as ghosts. By the time this revelation came, some of the characters were willing to move on, leaving this world behind, while others were unprepared and remained behind, and a few chose to become caretakers to help the next group of souls.

Would this version of the show have been as popular as the one with the Dharma Initiative, the numbers, Jacob and the Smoke-Monster, the Others, time-travel, the parallel universe, and so forth? Or even the original show in which the supernatural elements were actually downplayed?

Almost certainly not. But for me, at least, it would have been more coherent and I would have better understood people's involvement.

We Are Related to Neanderthals? Intriguing.

2010-05-15T19:46:00.001-06:00

At least, those of us of European or Southeast Asian descent are, according to recent DNA evidence acquired by sequencing Neanderthal DNA.

There's also a brief discussion of the implications of this discovery on this Caveman podcast from To the Best of Our Knowledge*.

As a very small number of you may know, I've been playing around with the idea of Neanderthals and other ancient hominids assuming the roles traditionally played by mythical humanoid species in epic fantasy. I've explored the idea of interbreeding as a part of that, so this evidence interests me.

*(Following that discussion on the podcast, there's a discussion with archaeologist Brian Fagan about his recent book on Cro-Magnons that I found myself snorting out loud at, due to the utter confidence with which Fagan offered as factual statements a series of completely unqualified assessments as to how the art of the Cro-Magnons revealed the depth of their supernatural belief system and the showmanship of their rituals, in spite of the fact that he HAS to be INTERPRETING and investing with psychological and emotional signifance a limited set of ancient visual and physical evidence that is, by the way, completely lacking in either written records or any kind of explanatory oral history or myths that might actually reveal feelings that are otherwise lost to time. His ideas are interesting, and he may be correct, but what he's stating as facts are conjectures that can't be proven. As someone with an extensive scientific background, his abuse of this distinction between hypothesis and empirical fact was a bit startling to me. Hopefully the book is more nuanced.)

If the Tea Party Was Black

2010-04-26T10:35:00.000-06:00

This is a thought-provoking post asking how we would view the actions of the Tea Party if its participants were black, which actually refers to events that have taken place in the name of the Tea Party and the hateful things that people supporting it have said.

Astonishingly, there are still a few people who bothered to offer comments that boil down to just saying, "Nuh-uh!" How anyone can observe the actions of the Tea Party and their supporters and genuinely claim that in NO WAY are they playing up a racial angle defies belief. Those people have to know they are lying.

I also find it a little humorous how easily dittoheads accuse someone else of being "whiny" while defending the Tea Party protesters, who do nothing but complain. Maybe because they scream, they don't qualify as whining?

Social Class and Adventurous Youth

2010-04-11T10:10:00.002-06:00

Michael Chabon wrote some powerful essays in his recent collection, Manhood for Amateurs, that address the way we try to control and protect the experiences of our children today, compared to how freely and independently our parents allowed us to roam our neighborhoods.

This rings very true for me as I look at my experiences with my own kids and compare them with the routine excursions of my childhood.

But when I walk or drive around my own neighborhood, I do see the occasional individual or pack of kids roaming around, heading to the store, the library, or simply wandering along the irrigation canal in the vague direction of a park or open field. What's interesting is that these kids are almost exclusively young people of color, usually Latino or African.

I say Latino because I hear the kids speaking Spanish to each other and because many of them have a mestizo cast to their complexion and features that is familiar to me from growing up in southern New Mexico. I'd guess that they're probably Mexican American, but that would be assuming more than I know.

I say African, not African American, because there's a small cluster of Somalis living in my part of Boise, part of a slightly larger but still small enclave of refugees who were resettled here in the past decade. So while many of these kids have probably grown up here and speak English, they weren't born here and I don't know their citizenship status.

These two groups of kids seem to have two basic traits in common. First, relatively speaking, they're poorer than the largely middle class suburbanites that surround them. They come from one of several apartment complexes, a trailer park, or a few duplexes occupied by a large number of people. Second, I think that many of them come from families where the parents and other adults grew up in places other than the United States of the late 20th and early 21st century.

I suspect that this combination means that their families have both fewer resources (in terms of time or the money to pay other people for their time) at hand to constantly monitor their children and fewer psychological hangups about leaving their kids to fend for themselves during certain times of the day.

So perhaps these kids have the opportunity to explore and create their own adventures that Chabon argues is denied to middle class American kids in our current culture. And I wonder how that will shape their experiences and attitudes. Are they getting a chance to develop a part of their imaginations that will be stunted in my kids and their peers? Or are they just wandering bored, waiting for a chance to play video games or sign up for a youth sports league?

Now, I'm not arguing that being an adolescent member of an economically disadvantaged minority with the freedom to roam around is the same thing as being a middle class kid with that same freedom. It's not. The middle class white kid has fewer basic needs to worry about and certainly finds it easier to fit in to the surrounding society, particularly in a city as white as Boise.

But our neighborhood is a pretty safe place, and the local branch library is nice, and I see a lot of these kids in and around there. So I hope that they are getting a chance to enjoy some of their unstructured, unsupervised time and indulge in that freedom. Because the irony would be a little hard to bear otherwise.

The other Blog

2010-04-07T13:46:00.003-06:00

Just wanted to say that I've added some more poems as well as some personal essays to my other blog, Sand Dreaming of Stars. I'm relatively pleased with them.

So anyone who reads this site should also check that one out. One Hand Clapping will still have the political asides, reviews, and comments on my writing efforts.

Drawing Some Maps

2010-04-05T13:02:00.007-06:00

Got a bit stumped with my novel outline over Spring Break, largely because there was no real time or space to think quietly with Lisa and the kids all home, partly because I'm stuck on some point of view issues.*

So I decided to work on setting issues today after running some errands. Wanted to get out of my left brain a bit, so I pulled out some maps I have showing possible configurations of the world's continents 250 million years in the future. Then I started modifying them to create some of the geographic and environmental conditions that I felt would facilitate the formation and style of the civilizations I already had in mind.

Relative success on that front. I have two regions roughly developed.

The one for the Draconic civilization features two large inland seas, a bunch of peninsulas, and a chain of volcanic islands off the coast. Geographically, it's kind of a blend of the Mediterranean with northeast Asia, bleeding into the Central Asian grassland/steppe. This works nicely with some of the imagery and city-state rivalries that I had envisioned. Essentially variants of the Hanseatic League, Peloponnesian League, Venetian maritime empire, and Japanese Shogunate are all in close proximity to each other.

This one for the Serpentine civilization has a huge, Andean or Himalayan-style mountain range with glaciers and a high temperate plateau dominated by a pair of large lakes with no outlets. Then there's a lower mountain range that forms the spine of the rest of the landmass. Within this central mountain range lies another valley with a large, fairly shallow lake.

To the west and south of the central range range are tropical highlands and lowlands that experience coastal monsoons. Several rivers flow into the southern portion. Most of this area is jungle.

To the east is a large, barren patch dominated by rocky hills and flat stretches of sand, broken up only by two long eastward-flowing rivers that are the lifelines of the region. The entire landmass lies at tropical latitude; only the elevation of the plateau region gives it a temperate climate.

The sea to the west is dotted with active volcanic islands formed by the collision of oceanic plates. This configuration puts together the three environs suited to the Aztec/Inca/Maya/Northern India mashup I had been working on.

The next trick is visualizing how these two landmasses connect to each other and then determining the proper scale. I have an idea of what I'm looking for here, but I need to think about the distances involved and the latitude effects a bit more.

Also need a lot of work on the names, but that can be done bit by bit.

Really should work on the city map for Cortado next, as that's more relevant to the actual events of the planned novel.

*My thought right now is to go with a central character POV surrounded by multiple points of view from secondary characters; still trying to balance those out and thinking about whether to switch on a chapter or scene basis within the storyline.

Long, Interesting Talk by Cory Doctorow on E-Publishing

2010-04-01T18:56:00.002-06:00

From his blog, Craphound. His talk focuses on the economics of electronic publishing and issues of DRM, copyright, and pricing.

This sort of thing is interesting to me as both a consumer and potential author, though the aspects that relate to being a writer are largely in the background because I've got so very far to go before I become competent at producing viable stories that I could sell.

Electronic Textbooks

2010-03-30T17:21:00.003-06:00

This post is an expansion of a comment I made on the blog Some Space to Think, specifically on "Blood From a Stone," a blog post about electronic publishing. Someone made the comparison between RPG books and textbooks and wondered what textbooks would be doing electronically in the future.

I work in textbook publishing (originally as an editor for an imprint of Harcourt, now as a freelancer) and I think that RPG books to textbooks is a valid comparison.

However, I haven't seen much progress on that front in the projects I've worked on over the past few years. Most publishers that I've worked with take one of two approaches to e-textbooks: online content distribution through courses presented via proprietary web sites or multimedia CD-ROMs bundled along with a printed book.

The web-based courses typically chunk text content into small pieces and incorporate links to video, audio, databases, and primary sources. In the best cases they can improve utility. But, sad to say, I've never been impressed by the aesthetics or layout.

The CD-ROMs have uniformly sucked. They almost always require the installation of some proprietary software and when that crashes, there's insufficient tech support from the publisher and no local IT for the teacher.

Neither of these approaches is innovative. As it stands now, the textbook business is pretty conservative in terms of technology.

Partly that's because many school boards and teachers are conservative and/or lack the funds to do more than put a few computers in a classroom and subscribe to a proprietary database for research. Partly it's because the cost of producing a technically sophisticated, attractive textbook is pretty high given the skill sets and expertise of their existing staff. Yet people won't pay as much for the electronic version as they will for the hardcopy.

We used to argue that the solution might be offering electronic textbooks as annual subscriptions, with each year providing updates. Fewer big influxes of cash from large book orders balanced out by a steadier revenue stream. But there's some evidence that if you make it too easy to jump publishers, then districts will do so with more regularity. That scares sales people. And you still need to have the display media in place.

The textbook industry is hemorrhaging money and employees right now, so perhaps there is room for a big paradigm shift.

But given that the publishers are conservative and their real customer base (the school boards and teachers who make the buying decisions) tends to be conservative about technology (because in addition to buying it, they have to maintain it*, and I've never seen a school district that had the IT staff it needed) I don't expect any great innovations soon.

If suitable display devices become common enough (such as cheap laptops for every student or some much cheaper version of an iPad), the first thing most publishers will probably do is put out .pdfs of their textbooks, because those are the easiest files for them to create.

*This is a commonly overlooked factor in the quest to put technology in classrooms. Teachers get incredibly frustrated when technology crashes. At the university level, my wife has tech support, but even then she has to have backup plans in place, and that's just to wing a one-hour lecture when the technology fails. Plus to replace a textbook you need a portable device, because the students will need to use it at home. Once it leaves the school anything valuable and electronic is in all kinds of danger.

Once More Into the Breach

2010-03-29T15:47:00.000-06:00

I go to send off my Acer laptop to their repair center for the THIRD time. The first two times I paid for shipping and they did the work for free. Which was good, as they didn't fix anything either time. (Well, the first time they replaced the hard drive--supposedly--but that didn't really help much.)

This time my issue has been "escalated" to Level 2 and Acer is paying the FedEx shipping costs. The system is still under warranty.

What I asked for what either a refund or a replacement laptop. Apparently I need to get to level 3 for that.

It's all sort of darkly humorous at this stage. They sent me a FedEx shipping number and a list of authorized places to drop the laptop off at. But no address to ship it to. I asked if I was supposed to ship it to the same repair center that I used the first two times. They sent a reply repeating my question and then not answering it, instead stating that I can drop it off at any of the authorized locations they sent me earlier, but the shipping number is good for only 48 hours. Just in case, I copied that other address and I'm bringing it along. In case, you know, they want a shipping destination. Maybe the shipping number provides that, but it would be brand new in my experience if it did.

I suppose this is all marginally better than a company that sells the computer and refuses to honor the warranty or that never replies to any communications from customers. But I'm not reassured by the fact that no one at any stage in the process has asked me for followup details on the laptop problems when their fixes didn't work. It's kind of a paternalistic system (send it in, we'll fix it, don't worry), but the pater familias in charge seems to be senile.

The Saga of My Crappy Acer Aspire

2010-03-27T09:10:00.004-06:00

Is, like many classic sagas, a tragedy.

I bought my Acer Aspire 5738-Z* laptop from Amazon a few weeks before Christmas for about $525. That meant my deadline for getting an 80% refund for returning the laptop was Jan. 31, 2010.

*Don't ever buy an Acer product. I would animate this warning with flashing red and blue warning lights and a siren noise if I knew how.

Oh, how I wish I had bitten the bullet then instead of trying to get the problems fixed.

I've returned the computer TWICE to the Acer Repair Center in Temple, Texas, which is apparently staffed by inbred mechanics struggling to manipulate their flipper-hands through an alcohol-induced haze while listening to country music. Once it arrived, they apparently decided not to examine the error messages I sent or to actually test the computer. They simply reloaded the operating system. Oh, and they claimed to have replaced the hard drive at one point, but since I kept experiencing the same problem when it came back, I really have no way of knowing if they just made that up.

I had to pay to package and ship the laptop both times. So I'm out another $30 or so, plus my time, right there.

My last email to the Acer service center, which promises to respond within 24 hours, has still not received a reply some three months later. Opening a repair ticket is a bit easier, but doesn't allow you to communicate with anyone. The notes attached to the defective laptop each time it returns are terse, like the pronunciations of a weather-beaten cowboy as he squints at the horizon. "Reloaded hard drive," he says. There's no response at all to the specific problems I've noted, or the error codes cited, or the questions I've asked. It's a drop-down menu of fortune cookie tech support wisdom.

I have high hopes that my current email to Acer might generate more than the automated response. Well, that's not true. I have a little bit hope. That's all I'm left with at this stage after Acer has managed to underwhelm my expectations with practiced ease.

This suicidal laptop has literally spent more time at the repair center or in the mail than it has sitting on my desk, said sitting time itself exceeding by an order of magnitude the amount of time that it has actually been on before the inevitable crash.

I suspect it's a hardware problem, given that the machine will crash regardless of the application being run (or attempting to run). It could be a Windows 7 problem. Because I am more of a nerd than a geek, the distinction doesn't matter to me at all. I've already spent more than enough time trying system restore discs, installing and reinstalling software, and browsing arcane tech forums.

Here's an idea: when you charge somebody more than $500 for a piece of equipment, it should work at the most basic level. That is, you should be able to use a fancy Windows 7 laptop to actually check your mail, look at a website, read a file, or compose a document before it blows up in your face. Without having to resort to a bunch of bizarre fixes and work-arounds. My fucking first generation iPod can do all of that except compose the document.

Acer screwed up somewhere with this product and it has cost me $550+ and many man-hours to this point to own something that doesn't work. I don't anticipate ever getting even a portion of my money back or of having a functioning machine. It has disappointed the kids so many times now that after it came back from the last "official" repair and we tried to get them to watch a movie on it, they started complaining. "It's just going to crash!"

And they were right.

So, Acer, until you make this right and stop jerking me around and wasting more of my money on pointless faux-repairs, YOU SUCK. I wish the worst business luck upon your company. I hope your stock falls, your products get recalled, and you become a laughingstock of the industry. And I hope your "Repair" Center in Temple, Texas is demolished and the ground sown with salt.

BECAUSE THIS WAS A CHRISTMAS GIFT FOR MY CHILDREN, THE WORST CHRISTMAS GIFT EVER. And after building this piece of shit, you have dangled promises of fixing it over my head for three months, stringing me along as I try to tell my kids that maybe they'll have a cool, up-to-date computer at their disposal for work and play, because dad thought buying a video game console was a cop-out when they could do so much more cool stuff with a laptop if I spent a bit more.

SO FUCK YOU, ACER. Because you are very, very close to the point where you've worn me down and I just can't muster enough energy to care about this any more, at which point you will have my money and I will have a shiny blue rectangle with rounded edges and a high-def screen that isn't even useful as a paperweight.

Don't buy an Acer. Of any kind. Ever.

Small Government Myths

2010-03-24T13:30:00.000-06:00

I could never figure out where Bush's credentials as being a small government guy came from, other than his penchant for cutting taxes, thus shrinking federal revenue while he was busy increasing federal expenses.

How exactly did George W. Bush shrink the size, power, and cost of the federal government during his eight years in office?

Was the government budget higher or lower in 2008 than in 2000? How about the deficit? Did the bureaucracy shrink? Did the amount of money pouring into government from lobbyists get larger or smaller? Did the federal government have more power over its citizens in 2008 or 2000? Was the national military bigger or smaller? Was the Constitution in safer hands? Was the government more likely to pry into your private affairs or less likely? More likely to tell your local independent school district how to run things or less likely?

Bush just accelerated the focus of big government from protecting the rights and well-being of citizens to protecting the rights and profits of corporations.

Making Shit Up: The Conservative Case for Torture

2010-03-23T12:54:00.006-06:00

Interesting article in the New Yorker dissecting the half-truths and outright lies that make up former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen's "Courting Disaster," a defense of the Bush administration's pro-torture interrogation agenda.

I seen this sort of thing all the time coming out of the Bush camp: the references to secret documents that support one side, testimony of experts who are not in fact experts on the subjects they are commenting on, the attempts to ignore any policy criticisms that emerged from within the administration to preserve the illusion of a united front, and the blatant rewriting of facts. It's straight big tobacco lobby tactics across the board.

It emerges in claims like these:

Obama dismantled the pro-torture Bush stance (when Bush himself did it in 2006 in response to criticism),
Bush could never have known anything about the dangers of al Qaeda (yet somehow Clinton still could have)
Bush didn't change the justification for the war with Iraq after the fact
Obama and his democratic cronies are trying to create a police state (ironically, using the very laws that Bush and the Republicans pushed through as necessary for national security and promised would never be abused . . . until they didn't have the gun in their hands anymore, of course)

It's fortunate that we live in a country where the message is controlled by the liberal media, so we never have to worry about this sort of thing getting widespread distribution to people who never, ever look anything up. . . oh wait, that's a load of bullshit.

Tea Party Racists and Conservative Apologists

2010-03-21T16:36:00.007-06:00

So you can read about the recent displays of Tea Party bigotry here at CNN, here at the AP, here on Slate, here on Salon.

In the comments section on the short Slate article, one particularly brilliant reader opined:

"Tea party protesters know any racist behavior on their part will be the sole focus of all the news coverage of their protests so they have everything to loose and nothing to gain from racist behavior. This leads me to believe those shouting racial slurs are plants who want to discredit the tea party protesters."

There are so many things wrong with this statement that it is painfully funny. Let's go step-by-step.

The racist behavior was not, in fact, "the sole focus of all the news coverage" of the protests. As you can see in the links above, this aspect was buried in the AP story and if you look up the protest coverage on CNN, you don't get the article I linked to at all; you get a longer article that links, near the bottom, to the racist events that took place. The Fox News article on the protest didn't mention the racist chants at all. What a surprise! So, the first half of the first sentence is simply, factually, incorrect.
The racist behavior on the part of Tea Party members has been going on for some time in many parts of the country. It hasn't slowed them down a bit, nor has it led to any serious backlash from GOP members who support the movement. A handful have criticized the use of racist slurs, but never when they were at a rally where they were taking place. GOP members just say that hey, the people saying that aren't our real people. As far as the image of Tea Partiers being hurt with non-conservative constituencies . . . um, that ship has sailed.
Oh, and it's "lose," not "loose." Looser.
The idea that the Democrats have cleverly planted faux racists among the ranks of true blue Tea Partiers is interesting, the way that it's interesting when someone talks to you about black helicopters, the evidence that the Moon landings were faked, or the anti-mind control properties of their tinfoil hat. Plus, of course, this guy is completely pulling the claim out of his ass.
Moreover, what always strikes me about these sorts of claims is that conservative Republicans think of these bizarre angles so quickly because IT'S EXACTLY THE SORT OF SHIT THEIR POLITICAL HANDLERS WOULD DREAM UP if they were running the opposition to something. Nothing more fearsome than the thought that the other guys might do to you what you're planning to do to him.

This comment was vivisected in the way you'd pretty much expect on a forum read by anybody who isn't a dittohead or a member of the Bill O-Reilly Fan Club. But this was followed up by one guy who just had to use his immense accumen to make this observation:

[name withheld to protect the ignorant], let's see if I can summarize most of the responses to your post:

1. RACIST!!!1!1one!!1
2.

Yeah, that's about it. No responses to your argument, or evidence that the event ever happened.

Let me go through this one, because it is also funny.

I'm not sure what to make of the "!!1!1one!!1" string. Perhaps it's a special code. [EDIT: It has been explained to me that this is a special Internet thing mocking someone's lack of self control . That the guy who made this post is confident enough to be mocking other people is even more amusing. It's like someone writing a crappy answer on an exam and then underlining it for emphasis.]
The next bit is fundamentally wrong on two counts. First, it stretches the definition of "argument" to include "wild-ass claim I plucked from nowhere, unsupported by evidence." But let's grant that bit. There were in fact responses to the substance of the original poster's argument. People commented that it was ludicrous, irrational, and one person actually provided alternate examples of racist behavior behaved in by Tea Party supporters at other times and places. These are no doubt confusing to the second quoted poster, because they involve actually reading words and formulating responses to those words, rather than looking into a sack of "handy-dandy conservative sound bites" and tossing out a specious claim. "They're not responding to your argument just because, in addition to pointing out that your argument was weak, they noted that you were likely being knowingly deceptive or simply stupid for advancing such a weak argument." Oh, and by the way, advancing such a pathetic case in defense of racists implies rather strongly that you are at the very least sympathetic to said racists.
I'm really not sure what the second quoted poster means when he refers to a lack of "evidence that the event ever occurred" cited by other posters. If he means a lack of evidence that the racist events ever took place, well, several things are wrong with that claim. To begin with, it's not the job of commenters to verify the facts of the story they are commenting upon--those claims are made in the news story itself. Then there's the fact that these events were reported by a variety of news agencies: look at the I cited above. Of course, Fox News ignored it, so perhaps it does not exist for this individual. So there's a large amount of evidence.
But perhaps our second poster got confused, as he was all the way into his second sentence and could have been losing his train of thought. Perhaps he meant to say that the other commenters had provided no evidence that the conspiracy hypothesized by the first poster had not taken place. If that sentence read a little strange, it's because trying to prove that something did not take place is tricky. It's even trickier when what you're supposed to find is evidence that disproves the ludicrous rant that someone pulled out of their ass or dictated from the scary voices that whisper in their ears as they are standing in line at the post office, DMV, or other agency of the devil. Can we agree that asking people to provide evidence to contradict an argument for which no evidence was ever offered in the first place is kind of asking the other side to do all the heavy mental lifting in your supposed debate? Kind of lazy, but typical for conservative spinmeisters. Not that this guy is a meister at any level.

The impressive thing is that these two managed to shove so many errors into two such short expressions of their inner conservative. But that's one thing that works to the advantage of such dittoheads: it takes much longer to thoroughly expose and dissect their flaws than it does to spew them out.

The Longhorns are a Very Dumb Team: Coincidence?

2010-03-18T22:34:00.003-06:00

Texas just solidified its status as one of the dumbest, most poorly coached teams in the country by pissing away an overtime game against Wake Forest, which also happens to excel at boneheaded plays and has an awful coach.

The end of regulation was hilarious. Texas missed a two-foot shot for the lead, then Wake got a jump ball. Wake could have sealed the game, but their player ran the baseline, which is only legal after a made shot. Unforced turnover. Then Texas gets a foul and its supposed star player bricks the freethrow that could have won the game.

In overtime, Texas raced to an eight point lead and got the ball with 2:30 left. They followed that up with: a stupid offensive foul, failing to box anybody out on an offensive rebound slam dunk, a 90% freethrow shooter bricking two freethrows, leaving the same guy open on a slam dunk, two free throws, leaving a three point shooter wide open, bricking two MORE freethrows to leave it a one point game, and giving up the game winning jumper. If Texas had been able to shoot better than 2 of 6 from the line, been able to box the same guy out, remembered to guard the three point line when a two-pointer would not have hurt them, or perhaps just played like their heads weren't wedged up their asses, they would have won. Wake tried very hard to give this game to them.

Now an awful Wake Forest team gets a win. Though if Texas had won, it would have been another terrible team getting a win. Basically this matchup should never have been made: neither of these teams could beat anybody competent in the tournament and neither deserved a win.

Hmmm. Texas has bad educational standards and wants to make them worse; the Texas basketball and football teams are notorious for making braindead, stupid plays. Coincidence?

Full disclosure: I went to the University of Texas.

Texas Changing its Social Studies Standards

2010-03-17T13:55:00.006-06:00

A few people have asked me about my views on this. There's an article here at NPR and another one here at Salon. But what do I think?

All State Standards Influence Textbooks in Some Fashion
I think it's a little disingenuous to say that Texas is the only state where a big central committee sets standards that every K-12 school district has to follow, because I've been asked many, many times to write or edit social studies textbook material to conform to statewide standards in other states, including California, Florida, Ohio, New York, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, etc.

Think of it this way: you can say that a district is free to adopt whatever books its wants to teach the curriculum. But if the state has a standardized test, and most states do, then the curriculum had better prepare kids for that test. So textbooks are influenced by the tests. And what do you think influences the questions that are put on those tests? The state standards. Plus, publishers don't like to take risks. They will typically look at sticking to the official standards for a state as being the path of least resistance in terms of entering the market. It's also an easier way to gather information; in this economy, everything is being cut, and you don't have solid feedback on the desires of every school district. Not that you'd act upon it anyway, because . . .

Being Big Matters More Than Being Right
It is absolutely true that changes made in Texas influence what happens in the rest of the country. Not because other states care so much what Texas does, but because multiple publishers will compete for the Texas market and write books to fit its standards. They ain't going to do that for Mississippi, New Mexico, Arkansas, etc. The guy is being a little generous to the textbook industry, I think, in terms of how modular it really is. They'll do a lot of supplemental ancillaries and handbooks geared to specific smaller states, but big, five hundred page four color hardcover books at a price those districts can afford? Good luck!

Those Who Forget History Are Going to Get Excited by the Same Old Shit, Or The Conservative Two Step in Texas Has Been Going on for Over a Decade Now
All the biz stuff aside, the Texas Essential Knowledge Skills, which were followed up by some other acronym and are now at risk of being replaced by this latest wave of crap: the Texas educational standards have always skewed conservative. Fifteen years ago they were complaining about liberal bias and working to institute a bunch of changes. I had to rewrite and edit two unique textbook chapters created just for Texas on the Civil War and Reconstruction because their points of emphasis were so damned different from every other major market in the country.

Now they want to put Jefferson Davis's inaugural address next to Abraham Lincoln's address as if the two were equivalent in quality, historical significance, or even impact at the time they were delivered. You know what that reminds me of? Twelve years ago I had to add a bunch of material, including primary documents, on the Anti-Federalists to counterbalance the discussion of the Federalist Papers. Why? Because the Anti-Federalists were opposed to a "big federal government" and the Texas conservatives wanted the seeds of that stuff planted very, very early in the discussion of U.S. history.

As far as emphasizing free markets, I'm not sure what the hell else they could put in there to make it clearer that in America we believe that free markets are good and everything else is bad, because they wanted that stuff stuck into the colonial history as well, in spite of the fact that we didn't have a damn free market at the time, we had a mercantilist system. So that ship has already sailed as well.

Bringing It Up To Date
In fact, as far as I can tell the main thrust of this latest conservative push is to bring their arguments into the history of the twentieth century, reinterpreting the New Deal (and I recall there were standards downplaying that ten years ago as well), downplaying the civil rights movement, and trying to boost Reagan to Mt. Rushmore status. That's getting more attention now because people remember that shit happening and perhaps the conservative agenda strikes some of them as a little full of crap. But I see it as all part of an ongoing process that starting revising colonial U.S. history and then sweeping forward in time.

Communities, Parents and Teachers
Ultimately it will come down more to the teachers and the communities they teach in as far as how the textbooks get interpreted. You can have all the inclusive history you like in a book, but if the teachers poo-poo it and nobody is ever tested on it, it tends to go in one ear and out the other or never to be read at all. Same thing with the conservative history that tries to exclude mention of non-white men.

Some say that if you don't teach your kids to ask questions, they'll accept whatever they are told. I think that if they don't ask questions, they will believe whatever their community believes. And they're likely to believe it anyway. Texas has a lot of conservatives dominating public politics and discourse, though they spend a lot of time complaining about liberals, which is like complaining that the guy you just kicked the shit out of is bleeding on your boot.

Will It Even Matter? (It's the Economy, Stupid)
The interesting thing to me that doesn't seem to be getting mentioned is, changing the standards does absolutely nothing until (a) you implement tests to pressure teachers to enforce those standards and (b) you actually buy new textbooks with the revisionist history in them. The mandated changes in content don't just magically whisper themselves into the hearts and minds of students and teachers.

I can tell you as a freelancer that both of those processes have ground to a halt over the past year and a half due to state budget cuts. So until the money actually gets disbursed and districts actually spend it on ordering new books and somebody writes the new books and the new tests, this is all smoke and posturing. And this has to happen outside of Texas as well for the change to have the national effect. You know how No Child Left Behind was an unfunded mandate?

Ahistorical History
As a historian, my sad experience is that for people who aren't interested in putting some effort into studying the past and thinking about it, history is little more than a cultural product, like some sort of eternal brand you wear that carries with it a preconceived set of associated values. I'm an American, so by definition I can't be an imperialist, democracy and capitalism are inextricably linked together in spite of much evidence to the contrary, and I live in a melting pot where every real American assimilates. Facts and logic and consistent categorizations don't enter into it, just the story we want to tell. And please make it simple. We would like people to be all good or all bad, brave captains of industry or despicable oppressors of the working class, bloodthirsty savages or noble primitives. An Andrew Carnegie who got rich by creating a monopoly that would be illegal today and using violence against workers who didn't toe the line but then became a notable philanthropist isn't something we're comfortable with. Thomas Jefferson the brilliant philosopher and writer and Jefferson the slaveholder with illegitimate children is a problem, so we play up whichever story suits our interests.

One of the ludicrous qualities of this attitude is that it tends to fix history, as though the character of America never changed over time. If we are a free market society today, we must have always been a free market society, say the conservatives. If we value diversity today then we must have always valued diversity, say the liberals.

And the converse applies at times as well, at least for conservatives. Some deeply Christian people settled in a particular colony, and most people on the whole were more religious back then than they are today, so Christian religion is obviously a cornerstone of our federal government, even though the Founders didn't bother to make that explicit in their documents and actually argued against it. We should be now like we were then if we want to be real Americans. (Of course, if we want to be sticklers that would mean that Catholics and Quakers are persona non grata in our wonderful old-school America, because they were pretty widely disliked back then in spite of being Christian. Shhh.)

I find it kind of sadly amusing that the zealots on each side can't stop themselves from trying to change the presentation of our history. I'm more of a liberal than a conservative to be sure, but I've had moments where I had to slap my head at some requests from the left-wing to frame history the way they wanted. (Such as the request to please add a biography of a significant contemporary Hispanic to the chapter on the American Civil War.)

So in the end, history itself wins, because history is about change over time, about cycles, about people adapting or refusing to adapt to the change around them. And it won't stay fixed until there is nobody left to write it.

In the end, I suppose we get the history we deserve as a society.

Birthday Loot

2010-03-03T16:59:00.005-07:00

So I had a delightful haul this year.

I got three graphic novels--Checkmate/Outsiders, The Invisibles: Say You Want a Revolution, and World Below--which I will read and probably comment on in my reading list in due course.

From my Wish List on Amazon, I also received an introductory guide to rhetoric and a collection of essays by scientists and engineers predicting what discoveries or developments will dramatically impact our future (This Will Change Everything). These both look very cool.

I received two New York Times crossword puzzle books, one with Tuesday puzzles (easy ones) and one with Wednesday puzzles (average ones) which is about all I can handle at this stage in my crossword puzzle development, though I do enjoy solving them.

My kids got me a set of DC action figures, the new ones that are smaller than the DC Animated style but have more articulation. It was a pretty cool limited edition Battle for Metropolis set they found discounted at Toys R Us, with Lex Luthor in battle armor, four Lexcorp troopers, Captain Marvel, Captain Atom, and Superman. The kids absconded with the figures almost immediately, but they eventually returned them and they are cool.

I did my usual sudden infatuation thing and tracked down a bunch of used, out of print hardcover books for the hard science fiction roleplaying game Blue Planet. I now have the Moderator's Guide, Player's Guide, Fluid Mechanics tech guide, First Colony city guide, Natural Selection planetary guide, and am awaiting the arrival of Frontier Justice, which details law and order. Now I need to make sure that I read the damn things. Odds of me ever actually playing this game? 5%. But if I enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed, say, the Transhuman Space books, then I'll get many hours of enjoyment in the year ahead.

And I received two of the Great Courses on DVD, Building Great Sentences and Games People Play: Game Theory. I hope to start watching these soon, learning some things of interest, and hopefully being able to apply them. If it goes well, I may look to get another of these courses for Christmas.

I think that's it. A LOT of material to read and/or absorb, but I consider that a win-win scenario. Either I don't get any freelance work in the near future and have the free time to enjoy this stuff, or the arrival of so many books leads to a contract offer, the way that washing your car helps ensure that it will rain soon.

Thanks to the wonderful people who fed my omnivorous reading habits! Rest assured that I will bore each of you with the fruits of my reading and researches at some future date.

Lost and 24 Compared to Comics

2010-02-28T11:59:00.006-07:00

Stumbled across this commentary on the television shows Lost and 24 . I agree more or less completely with all the points made.

Confession: my wife and I watch both of these shows. Further confession: I do so out of inertia more than anything else. Both of these series long ago jumped the shark.

My small contribution to the discussion is to compare these series to superhero comics.

Like an aging superhero comic book series, 24 simply ran out of new ideas for catastrophic crises and started to repeat itself. Unlike a superhero comic book, 24 doesn't have the option of staging an epic crossover with other titles to renew flagging interest, reimagining the powers of its protagonists, or dumping a retcon upon its viewers. All of these would violate the parameters of suspended disbelief that its audience has agreed to: violent torture will produce swift and viable intelligence, one guy can kill dozens of terrorists in a 24 hour period without ever being incarcerated or held for questioning for more than 20 minutes, you can drive all around a major metropolitan area without taking more than 15 minutes to get anywhere, and nobody functions worse on when sleep deprived.

24 is in the same boat as a venerable comic book character like Batman. It has to rely on two types of fans: those that have committed to watching/collecting the "character" regardless of who is writing or what the storylines are, and those who are new to the experience and the familiar plots. At the same time, the central conceits of the character have become creative straightjackets for the writers. You can't draw out storylines in 24 because everything has to take place in a frenetic rush as the clock ticks away. You can play up his gadgets or his detective skills, but these days you pretty much have to write Batman as a dark, terrifying hardass.

Unlike 24, Lost actually does employ comic-book inspired techniques such as retconning, time travel, alternate dimensions, body doubles, and paranormal powers to try and stay fresh. But it mixes this madness with an attempt to make us interested in the everyday lives of its characters, which becomes a bit confusing given that the characters are supposed to be normal people one second, supernatural candidates the next.

The biggest flaw with Lost is that the writers obviously never had a clear idea how their story was going to end when they started it, or even what the hell the story was about from one season to the next. It's like a comic that switches the creative team every year, changing the tone and style of the series.

Lost also makes two fundamental mistakes that a typical ongoing comic book series, at least a successful one, avoids. First, Lost very rarely answers any of the puzzles that it introduces. Second, it adds too many new characters and elevates them to major character status too quickly, diluting the focus on the characters that the audience has come to appreciate.

It's kind of amazing how Lost manages to rope in viewers, including me, by continuing to violate basic storytelling principles. On the one hand, I wouldn't watch the show with any regularity if my wife wasn't still interested in it. My main reaction now is amusement at the train wreck the plotline has become. On the other hand, I'm amazed at how fervently many fans seem to believe that there really is a point to the story or an upcoming conclusion that could possibly tie up all the loose ends that have been left dangling.

My New Review Scale

2010-02-27T11:41:00.006-07:00

For when I bother to take the time to review a book, I'm now trying to follow this scale, more or less.

An A is something very impressive, one of the better books that I've read.
A B is something that I enjoyed reading and think was well-crafted. Good but not great.
A C was mediocre and didn't impress me in any way. I may not have bothered to finish it.
A D is awful. I'd only review something like this if it has had success that seems unfathomable to me.
An F has no redeeming qualities and isn't worth a long review.

For works of speculative fiction, I'm looking at the following areas:

Setting: Depth, breadth, and imagination are the name of the game here. A good setting draws you into the world of the characters.
Characters: I'm one of those readers who needs to have at least one protagonist who is likable or whose actions can be explained by necessity. I hate antihero lead characters who show no qualms or suffering about the awful things that they do--some level of introspection is important. I also appreciate villains with some depth to them. And characters who are smart are much preferable to ones who just gut things out. Characters who change over time, either personally or in terms of their relationships, are also preferable. Just my taste.
Plot: I like to be able to follow the plot. If there are Byzantine twists involved, drawing my attention first here and then there, then the resolution needs to tie up all the major loose ends created by those twists. If the story is supposed to lead up to some big cosmic revelation at the end, it had better be impressive or astonishing in scope. Otherwise I just feel as though I've been jerked around. Nothing wrong with a solidly told story that builds logically and drives through to a conclusion that has real repercussions for the characters. A LOT of otherwise impressive speculative fiction falls down badly in this area. The number of long books I've read that just fizzle at the end with a confusing pastiche of imagery . . . ugh. I call it the 2001: A Space Odyssey factor. I do not enjoy spending a week or more with a book only to put it down at the end and say, "What the f**k?"
Language: Some writers just craft more evocative or beautiful sentences than others. Or they write dialogue that crackles right off the page. Either way, it stands out. And then there are writers with a solid plot and characters whose descriptions and dialogue are so laughably bad that they kill the sense of being immersed in the story by reminding me that I'm reading something written by a hack.
Cool Factor: Some ideas are just cooler than others. Has nothing to do with how scientifically or historically accurate or complex they are, everything to do with how clever and imaginative they are. It's very relative and it only feels cool the first time you encounter it. An example would be bullet-time from The Matrix. Cool the first time. Got old after that.
Big Ideas: A lot of speculative fiction addresses one or more big metaphysical concepts, issues such as life after death, the nature of intelligence, perception of time, and so forth. Trying to tackle a big idea deserves some credit in my book if it is handled in an interesting way.

For comics, I add the following criteria for Art:

Clarity: Can you understand what you're looking at? Can you follow the panel layout?
Detail: Can you tell one person from another without looking at their clothes?
Visual Style: Does the look of the artist's stand out in a good or bad way?

Review: Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon

2010-02-27T11:26:00.004-07:00

Grade: B

This short (about 300 pages), sweet science fiction novel tells the story of a brand-new spaceship captain dealing with relationships and duty and the day-to-day practicalities of space travel and proving herself under fire. This novel reminds me of the old Heinlein "juvenile" sci-fi novels, and I mean that in a good way. Another comparison might be the military sci-fi of David Drake crossed with the more character driven s.f. of John Scalzi. Some who don't like the novel seem to have compared it unfavorably to David Weber's Honor Harrington or the Lois McMaster-Bujold's Miles Vorkasian, arguing that Moon's protagonist is a bit of a rip-off of those characters. Well, I haven't read either of those--I tried reading an Honor Harrington novel, but the telepathic pet cat was a major turn-off. :-)

Moon puts the young merchant captain Ky Vatta through a lot of challenges, all of which flow logically from one trial to the next. There are a lot of little detailed bits of business about the practical side of being a starship captain and dealing in cargo, all while avoiding a lot of heavy concepts in physics or anything wildly innovative in terms of tech or the planetary societies being described.

It that sense the novel is not as creative or imaginative as Counting Heads or Mainspring, but it does a better job of making me care about the characters and actually resolving the plot points that do arise in a straightforward manner without losing tension. I stayed up late trying to get to the end of this novel, because even after the major crisis was resolved, I was intrigued by how the fallout would affect the main character and set up the next storyline. That's the sign of a well-written book to me. One of the best touches is how the protagonist realizes that she's been incorrectly stereotyped by her family, but that there's not much she can do about it because they keep interpreting everything she does through the lens of their experiences with her as a child.

I've already checked out the next book in the series.

Quick Rundown
Setting: A Solid B. Nothing really original, but all the details seem to have been worked out and things function in a realistic manner.
Characters: B+ to an A. Plenty of likable characters (some people don't like the protagonist for reasons I can't quite follow--she acts more competently than most young people), some scum bags, some sitting on the fence. Motivations are typically explained and make sense.
Plot: A-. It isn't full of stunning twists or a tricky mystery, but it moves along nicely and I didn't find the specific events to be predictable once the ship got into real trouble. A plot I can follow and that meets my criteria for believability is a solid winner in my book.
Language: B. Nothing really fancy here, but no clunkers or failed attempts at "kewl" futuristic language or grammar.
Cool Factor: C. This all felt very comfortable and familiar. But no wow factor for me.
Big Ideas: C. Not really what this book is about. The biggest theme is coming of age.

Review: The Boys Vol 1-4 by Garth Ennis

2010-02-26T13:55:00.005-07:00

Grade: D
I read these on someone else's recommendation: a librarian who went so far as to put them in my hands. He's had some good suggestions for other reads, so I went with this one and felt obligated to finish them. But I didn't take long doing it.

There's an interesting concept underlying the series, which is that a group of supposedly normal guys goes around keeping the superhuman jerks in line through nefarious means. The idea is that pretty much all the superhumans, at least the ones with public personas, are scumbags celebrities who abuse the puny humans around them without a second thought.

But that concept is buried under the sheer grossness that author Garth Ennis (whose last name, if there is any comedic justice in the world, must rhyme with "penis") can't seem to help indulging in. Calling his writing crass and juvenile is an understatement. Faces ripped off, multiple graphic and gross sex jokes played out in panels, people wallowing in their own shit, being urinated on, vomiting, and so forth. It's all there, more than once.

I get the impression that Ennis wants to come off as though he's poking fun at all the sick, twisted stuff that he writes about with comic glee, as though this is some sort of satire of a world brimming with demented sickos. To me, he comes across as a mentally disturbed writer with an obsession with bodily fluids and violence. Or possibly someone who fantasizes about being a superhero so he can have sex with rogue meteors and treat everyone around him like crap. Let's keep the radioactive spiders and power rings well away from Mr. Ennis, please.

Some of the plotlines, like the story of how the corporation Vought American became so influential through it's creation of superhumans, are pretty cool. Some might have been interesting if they hadn't gone so over the top. For example, a planned Russian coup involves keeping 150 superhumans cooped up in a warehouse until the big day when they will be set loose upon the city--except they're all unknowingly programmed to have their heads blow up on command. This would have been interesting with a dozen superhumans. But Ennis is like that guy from Spinal Tap--he just wants to keep turning the knob up to 11. He is the OverKiller.

Occasionally Ennis seems to be trying to slip a message about the corrupting nature of power and celebrity into these storylines, but it falls flat for many reasons.

His insights are not that original aside from the levels of depravity he associates with the supercharged Caligulas that he puts on the rosters of his thinly disguised mockeries of big name DC and Marvel group.
Even his big "shocker" reveals are pretty damn predictable. His Professor X knockoff is a pedophile who has abused all the members of his teams when they were children. Believe me, by the fourth volume in the series, I saw this coming very quickly.
We're supposed to empathize with the actions of a team of psychopaths going around blackmailing and killing superpowered sociopaths. Because their extreme violence and vigilantism is directed only at really awful people, it's okay. All publicly known superhumans (except ONE) are scum. It's not even a consistent premise, because the members of the Boys are all enhanced with the same formula that gives the superhumans their powers.

The underlying concept is interesting. It could have been handled much, much, much better, with better characters (there are exactly two likable characters in the whole series), more coherent plots, and without resorting to so much crude, endlessly repeated adolescent "humor."

Oh, and like a lot of Scottish comic book writers, Ennis seems to have a bug up his ass about the United States, though he also has characters claiming to love it in spite of its flaws. But just a suggestion: when you come from a small island that feels the need to draw extremely sharp distinctions between people of Scottish, English, and Welsh ancestry, it's a bit ridiculous to poke fun at Americans for celebrating their various hyphenated ancestries (Irish-American, Italian-Amerian, Mexican-American, etc) because "nobody wants to be like anybody else" or they're all searching for an identity because America has none.

Review: Counting Heads by David Marusek

2010-02-14T11:41:00.008-07:00

Overall Grade: B+
The book jacket for this 2005 science fiction novel includes blurbs such as "One of my favorite books of last year in any category" by the New York Times and "The most exciting debut SF novel I've read since Neuromancer . . . one of the best novels, period," by Fantasy & Science Fiction, and "one of the best first novels of the decade so far" by Locus.

It's certainly a good novel in many ways, though it didn't leave me eager to pick it up every day and I thought it was really running out of gas by the end.

Setting: I'd give the book a B+ in this area. As noted under "Cool Factor," the setting is very creative, but I never had a strong feel for how everything held together. Marusek throws in clones, artificial intelligences, moderate transhumanism, and advanced biotech and nanotech without really explaining or showing how all of these elements could coexist. That is, he shows them coexisting, but there's a lot of smoke and mirrors involved. I have no real idea of the citizenship status of clones, or the artificial minds called mentars, or exactly how the majority of regular people manage to earn money, or even how people regard the very strict population controls (which seem to vary throughout the course of the book).

Most critically for me, Marusek presents a future North America that seems to have a draconian centralized security authority that can violate individual rights, yet seems to derive its powers from no clear source of political or economic power. There are just a lot of competing companies that apparently cooperate to create an oligarchy that then monitors their own actions and members? It just felt disjointed at a fundamental level without some sort of clarification.

Now, some people, including the ectastic reviewers, were probably thrilled that Marusek neatly avoided the traps of info-dumping and lecturing to the reader that plague so many novels of ideas. He really concentrates on the show not tell approach. But his ideas were too complex and his plot too meandering for me to get a good grasp of them as I read. I felt that very little was explored--as a reader I was shown many surfaces of the world but not the heart or machines that drove it. So it left me a bit flat. I give it a high B simply because Marusek has so many intriguing applications of technology to society.

Characters: The book gets a solid B in this category for me. Some of the characters have the potential to be quite interesting, but we never seem to spend enough time with them as the narrative flits around from person to person. Others seem to exist mostly to show that supposedly stereotyped people (clones, retroboys, etc.) can struggle against the expectations of their type. The author cleared cared about characters and characterization, but I didn't care about most of them as the book drew to a climax. Others may have been more annoyed by the lack of likable characters than I was. I just wanted more interesting or fully developed characters. But I credit Marusek for caring about them.

Part One of the book is stronger on characterization and could stand alone as a novella. Part Two was a mish-mash. Several key characters do change over the course of the story, which is good. But the changes they undergo don't really seem to have anything to do with the main plot that supposedly links them together, with the exception of the clone Mary.

Plot: This is a B-, based largely on how disappointing Part Two of the book was. The plot at the core of Part Two is exceedingly simple: a powerful woman has been assassinated and there are mysterious forces trying to kill the barely living remains of her sole daughter and heir. This is then cluttered by byzantine twists and turns, multiple point of view characters, a lot of deus ex machina episodes with super-powerful computers and hidden conspiracies, and a lack of specific information to pay us off for our attention to the twists and turns. It's either a Gordian knot that doesn't get cut, or else the villains and their motivations are so simple that those we are led to suspect by one character in the beginning are really behind it all for the simple motivation of profit.

By the end, the thing I expected to happen had happened, and I felt somewhat annoyed at the twists and turns we took to get to that predictable event because the length seemed to be made largely of detours intended to show off clever ideas for the setting, which while entertaining individually were often confusing when I took a step back to try to fit them into the setting as a whole.

Language: While I wasn't bowled over by Marusek's style or his turns of phrase, I thought he wrote well. I was impressed enough by the jargon he devised to describe his future to rate his use of language as an A. The book is loaded with evocative terms like seared and iterant and company names like E Pluribus that are both informative about their subjects and believable in their usage.

Cool Factor: The book gets an A or A+ in this regard for the sheer quantity of clever and weird ideas that are jammed in. Everything from security slugs that crawl around sampling skin cells to rectal plugs that monitor neural and physiological reactions to the orbital Skytel billboard originally created as an anti-terrorism device are simultaneously creepy and intriguing. There's a very gifted imagination at work here.

Big Ideas: I really could not find a Big Idea in the big bubbling stew of little ideas and events that Marusek cooked up. In Part One, the Big Idea seems to be that in the future we will give up our privacy in the name of security.

Overall Grade: B+, carried by the trifecta of language, cool factor and setting while being dragged down by the characters and plot. I would have given the novel an A-, but several times over the course of the last 100 pages I had to stop and decide if I wanted to finish the book or not, because the stretching out of the wandering main and sub-plot lines and the lack of connection to the constantly shifting multiple characters made it feel like a chore. I had no expectation of being surprised by the ending (and I wasn't), but I had hoped that it would prove more illuminating as to why many events were taking place, or that it would resolve more than it did.

In general, I think speculative fiction critics are most often impressed by complex, innovative settings that involve multiple plot threads and characters. They don't seem to care much if those characters are likable (or at least capable of being related to), if the plot twists show good pacing and structure, or if the setting makes the reader work too hard to get a grasp of it. I do care about those three things, so while I've read highly praised books that were superb in my view, quite often I find them disappointing as stories because they fall flat in those areas.

Merlin, Forum, Bloggus Spherus

2010-02-13T18:57:00.002-07:00

Remember that Jorge Luis Borges short story, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Terius?" It describes how the history and culture of another world slowly infiltrates itself our own via a set of mysterious entries in a particular edition of the Anglo-American Cyclopedia. (For more details, follow the link.)

I love the story. It's eerie, the idea of something subtly alien sneaking into the environment.

I had a similar experience today reading this post in my friend Aaron's blog. It references a person I've never heard of (Merlin Mann), who is apparently somewhat famous for writing fiction and a blog I've never read, being slammed by another anonymous person on a forum I don't read, defended by someone who worked writing columns I never heard of for another venue I don't use, only to have Mann himself post a rejoinder (which I had to read twice to follow) that I think he wrote, only to mock himself a bit in the process.

It was remarkably self-referential set of comments referring to a world that seems to exist parallel to the one I live in. I don't even know how someone would learn about the dispute. It was all very surreal.

New Iron Man Trailer Looks Good

2010-02-08T12:19:00.001-07:00

See it here.

I also approve of the soundtrack choices.

Solitary Endeavors

2010-02-08T11:29:00.004-07:00

So, in the interest of being honest with myself, I'd have to say that my difficulties in preparing mentally and emotionally for the inevitable rejections of the story submission/workshop process are closely tied to my current situation.

I've worked one month in the past six as a freelancer. (Even I didn't realize it was quite that bad until I looked back at it.)
I don't have a very active social life in Boise outside of my wife and kids. We live on a street where most of my neighbors are considerably older than me. A few have died since we moved in. (One of my friendly neighbors who had a similarly irregular work schedule got foreclosed on and moved out a couple months ago. I was bummed when my favorite checker at the grocery store had to retire for health reasons.) My kids don't attend the local schools because they qualified for a highly gifted program that requires me to drive them all the way across town each day. My kids don't even have a lot of friends, to be honest. My son's Asperger's makes social connections hard for him and my daughter, though happy and friendly, isn't interested in teams or organized activities. So I don't meet other parents with any regularity via the school side of things.
I spend most of my days from 9 am to 3 pm by myself or in the company of people I don't know and don't talk to (such as at the library).
I'm a little bit sick right now, though I don't feel awful (I will spare all but Aaron the details).
I've had roughly zero success cultivating a sense of membership and camaraderie in a few communities online.

So, already feeling a bit isolated and not feeling like as much of a contributor to the family as I want to be*, my writing assumes a greater significance than it would otherwise.

I find myself feeling that I should be able to fill my downtime with completed stories the way I would be completing freelance assignments. That's not the way it has worked out. When I do finish stories, I'm invested in them as a potential source of external validation and social contact to a greater degree than if I felt a sense of accomplishment in other areas.

So far, that's added up to more pressure than is healthy or enjoyable. Writing becomes unpaid and unrecognized work, work that by its nature is solitary. Making the time for it often leaves me feeling more isolated.

In summary, I currently live about as solitary a life as a married guy with kids living in the suburbs could. The writing process itself is solitary when it comes to creating my own imagined worlds and stories. When my efforts to reach out via my writing in a serious way get rebuffed or ignored, it feels like I wasted my time and it hurts more than it reasonably should.

Recognizing all this rationally is not the same as knowing how to cope with it emotionally. So I'm feeling down on writing because as I have currently constructed my view of it, it hasn't been meeting any of my needs. Hence my desire to reexamine and revise what writing means for me and what I want to gain from it. Maybe orienting it more toward being fun for myself isn't the right road. I don't know.

As far as the rest goes, I'm trying to build more connections. I volunteer at school every week. I've started going to the gym and playing pickup basketball a couple times a week. I'm clumsily trying to forge a few more friendships, with limited success. Hopefully the economy and publishing industry will actually improve enough to where I can get work and stop having contracts canceled on me just as I'm ready to begin them (twice in the last six months on that score).

* Yes, I do a lot around the house and with the kids and I still feel a need to at least qualify as a part-time wage earner. I don't know if this stems from having supported myself right out of college and having been the primary wage earner for years, or if it's tied up with being a guy raised in this culture, or both.

Only Connect (?)

2010-02-08T07:05:00.000-07:00

In a recent email exchange with my good friend Aaron about the topic of writing, I expressed a loss of joy with the writing process and suggested that I needed to go back to my roots as a writer, the desire to entertain and delight myself (as well as exorcise certain creative impulses that plagued me with daydreams and other distractions until I set them to paper).

Aaron asked, quite reasonably, if the idea of writing for myself wasn't a bit disingenuous. Isn't the goal of writing to communicate?

That got me to thinking. I've always had a knack for communicating factual information and broad ideas. That skill carried me through school and has paid my bills (with varying degrees of success) in various nonfiction writing fields (technical writing, academic writing, educational writing) for many years now. My goal when I write such things is clearly to communicate, as well as earn a paycheck. Moreover, I tend to work fairly well with the restraints imposed upon me by my bosses and clients.

At the same time, in that form of writing I'm almost always one step removed from the actual audience for the writing. I deal with the editors and the clients and their guidelines, but I don't see the end-users or the teachers or the students and their reactions to the documentation, lesson plans, or textbooks. So I communicate, but I don't really concern myself so much with how well I connect, because the potential audience is so vast and diverse that it's inevitable that some will like it and some will not. It's all hypothetical in the end; I'm writing to the best of my ability to get paid. My satisfaction comes from doing the work on time and as well as I can.

There's another kind of writing that I do quite frequently that has no real audience other than myself. I get significant satisfaction out of writing for myself just to develop my thoughts on a given topic with greater clarity. It scratches an itch, so to speak, whether anybody else reads those ideas or not. This essay is an example of that sort of writing, which I don't expect to be read.

Stories are different. They're more personal and subjective. In my case, at least, I can't see writing stories as any sort of practical avenue toward making money. So the motivation for writing them has to come from within, from some desire to express a personal vision.

Because of this personal and somewhat intimate investment, when stories are rejected it is more confusing and painful. What began in my childhood as an effort to shield myself through imagination from a larger world that so often frightened, mocked, or rejected me becomes instead a gateway that so often leads those very same emotions right to my heart. And everything and everyone I consult tells me that the writing world is full of far more rejections than acceptance. I think the idea is that you do care, but you just expect to keep getting beaten up and turned down and learn to accept that as part of the process.

To make that equation work, the value I attach to any appreciation has to outweigh the negatives of confronting regular reminders of the reality that in fact, other people don't understand me, either through my own inability to express myself or through a simple lack of interest or empathy. I think I also have to believe that an audience exists of reasonable size, say a thousand or more people, that will appreciate my efforts. I just have no rational evidence or personal experience to base such a belief on.

The idea of being published just for the sake of being published used to drive me, but over time it has lost appeal. I'm already a published writer, just an obscure one.

Why would publishing a story and not caring deeply about its reception be any different than ghostwriting a chapter of a history book and never knowing what students think of it? The mental and emotional effort required to do the former, at least for me, is much greater than what it takes for the latter.

At this point I need to figure out if I have enough faith in my ability to connect and enough belief that those connections will be worth the effort involved to pursue writing and storytelling for other people.

Write What You Know(?)

2010-02-07T10:31:00.003-07:00

Write what you know.

This is a pretty common aphorism among writers, particularly fiction authors and those in genres such as travel writing.

In the contexts where I've encountered it, this maxim seems to be further distilled into the idea that you should write from the perspective of what your personal experience has taught you about people, places, events, and activities.

I struggle with this tenet in all its literal manifestations. I haven't done a lot of things or been a lot of places; more specifically, I haven't done many wild or risky things or traveled to exotic and dangerous places. I'm not inclined by nature to start now. While over the course of my life I've always had a knack for being personable, over the last decade or so I've struggled to connect with other people beyond a very superficial level.

So to write what I know leaves me with what I have experienced. And I have some fundamental problems with the most literal and practical applications of that approach:

I have been part of a lot of ill-timed, delusional, and broken relationships. I don't feel like writing in a direct way about any of them. Sometimes out of respect for a relationship that survived a rough patch, sometimes out of a respect for the privacy and implicit trust of those I once cared about, and sometimes because it is just too painful. I read authors like Michael Chabon and at the same time that I'm impressed and moved by the personal themes he puts upon the page, I can't imagine subjecting my own relationships to that same surgical scalpel and magnification.
It's gotten to the point where I don't trust my memory, at least in terms of the sequencing of events during certain broad periods of my life. There are blocks of years in my twenties and thirties where I'm not certain of the order in which things happened, which plays hell with any pretense of assigning cause and effect. When I try to zoom in on specific events, I have trouble recalling many of the sensory details that seem to be the hallmark of writers who plumb their own lives for material. I become a cinematographer touching up a silent, black and white reel of my own past by dubbing in sound and painting in colors that seem appropriate. To be honest, this confuses me, and I feel like I might be able to improve the clarity of my recollections with some practice.
It was recently suggested to me that I try writing a story of my own life as both a literary and a psychological exercise, then examine it to see how I would change it as an author. I think this is an interesting idea that has some merit. But after sitting down to give it a try, I realized that at this point I have no interest in the story of my own past. It seems very, very predictable in many ways. It also tends to depress me. Books and films like that don't interest me either, hence my constant love for genre fiction and lifelong disinterest in most "literary" slice of life novels and short stories.

Now, you could say that all fiction writers refine the broad strokes of their personal experience into essential truths that they incorporate into imagined people, place, and events. Yet when I read biographies or biographical essays of many writers, it's shocking how directly they transfer the details of their lives onto the page. And so often it is the details that ring true or false for readers and critics. So the act of distillation is harder to pull off than it seems, and is probably best left to more experienced writers who have already made their bones by pulling them free from their flesh and holding them up to the light.

Perhaps my biggest weaknesses as a writer are an unwillingness to offend or to suffer sufficiently for my art. But I also suspect that there's something more lurking around, a difficulty in translating my view of the world for other people, in my inept efforts to connect and communicate the personal.

RPG Setting Construction

2010-02-06T15:44:00.002-07:00

Reading this post on Aaron's blog (which linked to this post on game-designer Ken Hite's blog) got me thinking about presenting setting content in a game.

I've already toyed with the idea of combining generalized story hooks with every significant piece of campaign setting.

Now I'm thinking about the technique used in Weapons of the Gods by R. Sean Borgstrom, as described by Hite, where the key setting information is broken out in to separate Lore sheets that come with vignettes, mechanical benefits, and specific story hooks. The players have to purchase these Lore sheets with Destiny points.

I like this idea and the example I found in the free intro .pdf for the game that you can download from rpgnow.

It would be interesting to incorporate some of the same aspects into skills--for example, say a character could have a skill ranked from 1-5 in starship engineering. You could have several different chunks of flavor text, one for each broad level of skill (say ranks 1-2, 3-4, and 5 for three levels). The lower level descriptions are basic and to the point. The greater your knowledge, the more info about the starship systems is provided.

All of this would probably work better in a .pdf than in a printed book, I imagine. Some content might need to be presented in more than one location for ease of use.

Degrees of Obscurity

2010-02-05T12:16:00.003-07:00

I was reading an essay in Wired Magazine where Clive Thompson was discussing the pitfalls of becoming too popular on a social networking site like Twitter. The gist of the argument was that once a certain threshold of ten thousand or so followers is reached, the two-way conversation and interactivity of the network ceases as participants begin to see themselves as anonymous faces in the crowd rather than active members of a community.

My first thought on reading this was to wonder how the people taking part could tell the difference between a virtual community of 1,000 and one of 10,0000 if a single person is generating the original content. Ie., person X tweets, audience member Y considers posting a reponse. Why would it matter to Y if there were 100 people reading Y's reply versus 10,000?

I get that in front of a real crowd, there would be some anxiety. But you don't have that visceral experience with the other followers.

The other thing that threw me was the idea that a virtual community of several thousand could have "intimate" connections with each other. What? That's ridiculous. At best that community can fragment into a few tight cliques of a hundred or so each who then interact with each other.

So perhaps my confusion comes mainly from the assertion that the relationships break down starting at 10,000 or so instead of breaking down at a much lower number, say 1,000.

The line that really jumped out at me in the essay was this one: "Meanwhile, if you have a hundred followers, you’re clearly just chatting with pals."

I read that and just blinked in amazement. If I chatted with all my pals, I could maybe get to 20.

Ironically, the whole point of the post was to celebrate the value of small group dynamics and relative obscurity, noting how they can inspire creativity, honesty, and meaningful conversations among members. It's just that what Clive Thompson considers small and what I consider small differ by an order of magnitude.

I guess I am dramatically obscure.

More and more, my interactions on the Internet leave me feeling isolated and small. I clearly had a kernel of this impression in me from the beginning, as seen from the title I chose.

I wonder if the first person who realized that all the stars in the night sky were suns with possible worlds orbiting them felt the same way.

Created a New Blog, Played More Basketball

2010-01-29T14:20:00.002-07:00

So I jumped back in the saddle and played another full court game down on campus today. Some of the same guys were there. I wasn't great, but this time I made a few plays across the board--tough rebound, defense, shot in traffic, pass in traffic--that got some love from the other members of my team. Still couldn't hit the outside shot. Lifting weights first might have contributed to that, but it also seemed to calm me down a bit at the start. Have to figure it all out slowly. Don't think I can play more than a couple days a week at most. We'll see how much agony I'm in tonight.

Also created a new blog, Sand Dreaming of Stars, just to post my fiction and some of my poems. Becoming an official, paid, published writer is less a part of my dream than just getting my ideas out of my head and into the world. I still plan on submitting things, but I'm also going to put rejected or in progress material here under a Creative Commons 3.0 noncommercial license. If it ever gets to the point where somebody cares about who has first publishing rights to something I've already posted, I'll have made much more progress than I have to date.

Got a Rejection

2010-01-28T21:56:00.004-07:00

What a crap day. I played full court basketball for the first time in a year today, didn't play well, got completely exhausted, hurt my leg a bit, and felt quite old.

I noticed that my right front tire is very low on air pressure when I got home (maybe a slow leak, don't know yet) and found that my portable air compressor had a dead battery. Hopefully I can get it recharged in time to pump up the tire to take the kids to school tomorrow.

My neighbors who had asked me to watch/feed their six pets on Friday then revealed that they needed me to be taking care of them Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Then, right as I was getting ready for bed, while doing something else on the computer, two new emails arrived, one of which was a rejection for my flash fiction story "The Cold Portions" from Flash Fiction.

You might recall that my first submission to them got a very positively worded rejection email.

This one was a little simpler and much less helpful. "Unfortunately, I'm going to pass on The Cold Portions."

I felt pretty proud of this story and I have to admit I'm surprised as well as disappointed at the rejection and the utter lack of interest it conveyed.

2010 sucks so far and it's not like 2009 had raised the bar particularly high.

Feeling Blue

2010-01-28T09:22:00.003-07:00

Been sort of morose and uninspired lately. Ideas come but I can't seem to motivate myself to pursue them with much enthusiasm. Haven't even been reading as much in the last couple weeks.

I think it's a combination of:

My Job Status, or Lack Thereof. I always get a little anxious when I haven't worked for a bit, but the last year or so the freelance scene has been so unreliable and inconsistent that it's beginning to wear on me. I had thought that my pseudo-career was fairly well insulated against the types of layoffs that have been plaguing people I know in the publishing industry, but that assumption isn't holding up very well at the moment.
The Economy in General. Hearing depressing economic news week after week is, well, depressing.
Politics. Ugh. Why is it that when Democrats are down they stay down for 3-4 years at least, while the Republicans just seem to bounce back within a couple years no matter what they were responsible for? Oh, right, it's because the Democrats can never get organized and the Republicans always conveniently forget how they triggered so many of the problems they complain about because they believe in principles, not empirical evidence.
Getting Older. Gotta see the doctor about what may or may not be a prostate issue on Monday. Right wrist always hurts a bit, other parts just gradually breaking down.
Writer's Block. Somehow it was easier for me to lose myself in reading and writing escapist fiction when the world around me seemed generally okay but just less fulfilling and more brain dead than I wished it would be. The world still seems mostly brain dead, but I have more worries.

Hopefully this is just a phase that I will be able to transition from into something better.

Star Trek Computers

2010-01-15T12:11:00.002-07:00

On Star Trek, especially Next Generation, whenever anybody has any serious questions to work out on the ship computers, they give verbal commands and the computer talks back to them.

This would logically lead to a situation akin to sitting on a bus or in a store full of people talking on their cell phones--stray bits and pieces of conversation colliding to create a noisy, discordant background noise.

But when you enter the bridge or the engineering room, you don't hear a dozen muffled conversations, just the hum of machinery. So what the hell are people working on?

Windows 7 Still Sucks

2009-12-31T17:19:00.003-07:00

Just as 2009 comes to a close without any clear decision on my part whether to continue this blog or not, I wanted to report that the new Windows 7 laptop we got for the kids this Christmas has already locked itself up with a major software crash that required two separate system restores (to different dates) and still hasn't been resolved after roughly four hours. It's still taking forever to boot up in both safe and standard mode and then hanging whatever process I try to initiate.

That's right, it's less than a week old. Barely has any damn files loaded on it after I deleted the bulk of the junk it came with.

Windows just keeps running variations of CHKDSK that keep reporting slightly different results. Now it finishes pretty quickly, tells me everything is fine, and then locks up. For some reason it seems to have forgotten how to connect to the household wireless network. I'd check on that, but Windows automatically tries to access the Internet to check my security status, freezes Internet Exploder when it can't make the connection, and dies before I get the chance to correct anything.

This could be the result of the most recent Windows update (of which there have been two "critica"l updates in three fucking days), it could be the result of my daughter trying to download and install the Unity Flash player, it could be some combination of the two, or it could just be the fact that Windows is a steaming pile of shit no matter how prettily it gets dressed up. At this point, the Unity Flash player should be uninstalled, but I can't check to see if it is still there because the system locks up before I can open anything through the control panel.

Half the time when I reboot I end up with a blank screen, and the rest of the time I get my crippled Windows 7 desktop, which is prettier but ultimately just as useless.

If I have to reinstall the operating system along with the programs that I did put on the system, I'm going to be even more pissed off than I am now.

In related news, I've had the Mac that I'm writing this blog post on a year and a half ago and the biggest problem I've had is old CDs with scratches getting stuck in the DVD Superdrive and taking interminably long to eject. Sometimes it crashes in the middle of Word documents. Generally I don't lose much information. That's annoying.

Very small potatoes compared to this insanity. And I paid for this privilege.

The lesson in my view is: don't buy Windows machines if you have any choice in the matter.

Deciding Whether to Continue the Blog

2009-12-24T09:45:00.000-07:00

So, I'm debating whether keeping up with the blogging is worth the time and energy I sporadically invest in it.

In terms of keeping in touch with friends and family, it would probably be more efficient for me to put a profile on something like Facebook.

In terms of reviewing books and such, I'm not sure that the reviews help other people and I'm not entirely clear on what I get out of them. At times it feels like a burden, as though I have to review something I've read if I thought it was particularly good or bad or if it just left me confused.

Writing about my own writing has been somewhat helpful for me. But I think that having a space dedicated solely to that might be more productive than the mishmash I have now. And I'd like to publish some material before going much further down that route.

That leaves the occasional commentary on current events, which certainly gets lost in the big Internet blur.

Perhaps one option is to separate this blog into a few different "channels"--one for reviews and one for posting or discussing my own writing, and then a Facebook page for minor social updates and connections.

Review: Lamentation by Ken Scholes

2009-12-23T06:02:00.001-07:00

Lamentation is a marvelous book that strikes a careful balance between the imaginative inventions of a distant future and the emotional depth of its main characters.

The events of the story are triggered by the awful destruction of the legendary city Windwir, which held the collected knowledge of lost ages under the auspices of the Androfrancine Order. The city was annihilated by the use of long-lost and forbidden magic, magic that was no doubt recovered as a result of the Androfrancine's own holy quest for knowledge in the ruins of the world long destroyed.

Precisely how Windwir was destroyed is revealed in short order. Why it was destroyed is a question that takes much longer to answer. And the impact of its destruction upon the lives of the main characters and the course of nations is the story whose first portion the book tells.

Scholes takes an interesting approach with his narrative. Each chapter presents us with several short sections a few pages in length, each offering the point of view of a different character. Most of these characters have their stories followed throughout the narrative. I found that this allowed Scholes to follow a number of storylines as they wove in and out of each other, intersecting and separating at different points.

Normally that sort of storytelling approach can leave me somewhat lost in the overall narrative or frustrated when the author jumps away from an interesting storyline into one I don't care about. Scholes avoids this by keeping each of the sections very succinct yet informative.

As a result, once you leave one character's storyline and touch upon the stories of three others, say, you haven't forgotten what you left behind when you return to that original character.

Moreover, I found that I liked all of the primary point of view characters that Scholes introduces.

These characters include: Petronus, the Hidden Pope; Rudolfo, the Lord of the Ninefold Forest Houses; Jin Li Tam, daughter of the mighty Tam banking family and an adept spy; and Nebios, the last (human survivor) of the destruction of Windwir. Another character, the mechanical man Isaak, does not get his own point of view sections in the book but really comes to life through his interactions with the main characters. Like Guy Gavriel Kay's work, this book is filled with clever people struggling to understand and outwit each other. There are also some moments of romance and love that are genuinely touching.

The setting is also interesting, a mixture of mostly well-understood magic (more akin to alchemy than traditional spellcasting), recovered technological artifacts, and high-Renaissance technology. Scholes pulls a clever trick here, in my view. The first few chapters bombard the reader with unusual images: birds carrying messages via carefully knotted cords dangling from their legs, mechanical men, soldiers treated with magical powders that make them both invisible and superhumanly fast, and so forth. But then these unsual creations are explained and expanded upon gradually over the course of the novel, while only a few new bits are introduced, so that by the end they have become facts of the world with which the reader is comfortable.

Compared to something like John C. Wright's work, which hurls out Big Ideas every couple pages at a breakneck pace, Scholes's work here is calmer. Instead of adding on new supernatural or supertech concepts, he expands upon the societies and major players in his future world.

There are clearly a lot more Big Ideas and Wondrous Things lurking around in the setting, waiting to be uncovered. But like an archeologist digging through a delicate past, Scholes shows patience and restraint in revealing their details over time.

Excuse Me While I Turn Down the Awesome

2009-12-22T21:05:00.002-07:00

Courtesy of my friend Geoff. This is what being the commander of a starship is supposed to be like. And some days I feel this good.

It's also why, even though The Next Generation ultimately ended up being a wiser and better written show, and the boots, highwater pants, and mini-skirts are about as dated a futuristic look as you could conceive of today, if I had a chance to play a Star Trek rpg (and I own two of them, by Last Unicorn Games and Decipher, both out of print), I would still totally go Old School Trek. For the awesome.

Writing Goals and Submitting Stories

2009-12-22T08:41:00.001-07:00

At the beginning of December, I went over my list of goals for the year in order to evaluate and revise them.

One of those goals involved writing. I wanted to spend at least X number of hours writing fiction in 2009. I even specified that I shouldn't count the time spent writing about setting material toward achieving that goal. I know my habits in this regard.

Well, I did not meet that goal. I can't say for certain how far short I fell, because very early on I stopped keeping track. I just know that I would have had to write an hour a day every day (and then a little extra) to meet it and I did not do that.

In the past I've had similar goals, all based around writing for a certain amount of time or to produce a certain number of words on a daily basis. Because I've heard lots of advice that you should write every day to develop the work habits and professionalism needed to become a success.

My current approach is different. Now, instead of trying to hit daily writing goals, I'm trying to finish stories. That's pretty much it. My goal is to write roughly one short story of moderate length (say, 5,000 words or so) every month, or a very short story (like a flash fiction piece of under 1,000 words) every couple weeks.

In terms of how much I write on any given day, this goal doesn't necessarily translate into a lot of new words on the page or a lot of time at the keyboard or notepad. But it has occurred to me that those daily writing goals tend to focus upon the peripheral aspects of writing rather than the end result--a story I like well enough to submit to a paying market.

How has this worked out so far? Well, at the moment I'm a bit ahead of schedule. I started writing on December 7th and yesterday I submitted my second complete flash fiction story to a paying market: Flash Fiction online, no less. That tops my entire short story output for the entire year.

I think the pace of a story a week will taper off as I start to work on freelance projects. But I think my initial goals are still achievable. Thirty days to write 5,000 words works out to less than 170 words a day.

The truth is that the writing has come in bursts. I wrote one story in its entirety in a single day and then spent the rest of the week revising it, probably accounting for no more than 150 new words. But they were important words. The other story I wrote in a couple bursts and then rewrote quite heavily in another chunk.

In between working on the stories, I spent time thinking about the stories and what I was trying to achieve with them. I also sent them out for comments by friends and family. Then I spent my writing time each day going over the story in some detail and tweaking it as I thought necessary.

Since my goal is to complete stories and submit them to professional markets, I don't think quite as much about the process as I used to. I'm concentrating more on the stories themselves. As a result, I'm working in more of a natural flow. Some days are just more productive than other days in terms of raw output, but other days that are superficially less productive are just as vital for the flashes of insight into a story that they provide. Focusing on shorter lengths has also helped keep my wandering mind from digressing down too many paths.

I'm Mr. Heat Miser

2009-12-21T20:25:00.005-07:00

Watched The Year Without A Santa Claus with the wife and kids tonight. Hey, I love Christmas. Giving and receiving presents, the excitement on the kids' faces, even some of the whole peace on Earth vibe. All fun. But eight going on nine years of living in a northerly climate have taught me that when it comes down to it, I'm a Heat Miser kind of guy. A low of 60 is a beautiful thing.

Review: The Umbrella Academy

2009-12-21T06:15:00.002-07:00

This graphic novel was written by Gerard Way, lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance, whose music I'm frankly unfamiliar with. (They make a big deal throughout the graphic novel of the author's rock star status.)

Nothing against Way using his apparent star status as a musician to get this gig, as well as an apparent sequel volume that I won't be reading. But it reads like a bunch of unrelated bits that he thought were cool and decided to string together with amateurish glee.

It's the story of a group of kids, born under unusual circumstances and gifted with extraordinary powers that they use to save the world, under the guidance of their adoptive billionaire father, who is apparently an alien.

The story jumps back and forth between the present day, when the adult members of the Umbrella Academy unwillingly reunite to face yet another threat to the world, and the past, when they began their journey toward familial dysfunction.

The story has some interesting ideas, a lot of weird ideas masquerading as interesting ideas, a cast of potentially intriguing but undeveloped characters, and only the vaguest semblance of a plot. It reminded me of Grant Morrison's run on The Doom Patrol, with a slightly more coherent premise, equally weird but less interesting characters, and plotting that makes Morrison's early work look tightly scripted.

Bad guys appear and disappear with no clear motivation and no apparent relevance other than to provide a cool image and a loud bang. Even the main villains are the thinnest of sketches. Plot hooks are left dangling everywhere. It's not even clear just what kind of powers the various members of the Umbrella Academy possess. In some ways I applaud Way for trying to embrace the idea of showing rather than telling, but the scenes he devises are a jumbled mish-mash that end up telling us very, very little about anything. The big finale is a complete deus ex machina moment that relies upon one of the Academy members displaying a power nobody realized he had that single-handedly saves everyone from doom.

Ultimately, the Umbrella Academy is style turned up to 11 and masquerading as substance. The five star reviews on Amazon leave me scratching my head, frankly. The three-star reviews seem to hit the nail right on the head. If Way had exercised the storytelling discipline to flesh out anything that he dabbles in here, I'd have given him higher marks for the creativity of some of the ideas he tosses out.

But I feel that in the current comic book marketplace I can easily find much better told stories that are creatively satisfying.

Review: World War Z

2009-12-20T16:53:00.006-07:00

I picked this book up from my local library on the slightest of whims.

I'm not a fan of zombie films (never even seen Dawn of the Dead) or zombie comics (I like Robert Kirkman but have never read any parts of his zombie opus The Walking Dead) or even zombie roleplaying games (I own the Angel and Buffy games from Eden Studios, but have never been interested in their flagship product, All Flesh Must Be Eaten). I'm not even a big fan of postapocalyptic settings.

On the other hand, I do like alternate histories and oral histories, and World War Z is a surprisingly well-done combination of the two. It's presented as a collection of interviews with survivors of the great zombie war, conducted on behalf of the United Nations as part of its efforts to record the history of that horrific event.

The interviews move all around the globe, talking to people at every level of society who had some role, large or small, in the unfolding of the conflict and the desperate attempts to fight back the zombie threat. The international scope of the story is one of the strong points for me, giving the reader glimpses of very different reactions to the zombie threat in different corners of the globe, as well as insights into the different societies themselves.

Another impressive aspect to the book is the level of thought Brooks has given to all aspects of the zombie threat. He deals with people trying to escape to the mountains, to the frozen north, to islands, to the open sea, and underground. There's even a glimpse of what happened to the crew aboard the International Space Station. Every possible manner in which people might be expected to react to the rise of the walking dead, both rational and emotional, seems to be covered at some point. There are unexpected reactions as well.

Many of the vignettes are powerful little stories in their own right. There are several recurring characters, but many one-shot glimpses into the horrible trials that people endured.

It was the thoroughness with which the topic was explored, combined with the diverse and interesting cast of characters portrayed, that made this book a wholly unanticipated good read for me. Interestingly, Brooks spends basically no time explaining how the zombie threat even arose in the first place. Most books would spend a lot of time belaboring this point. I guess zombie afficionadoes are supposed to know this sort of thing already.

I found this absence of explanation somewhat refreshing, because (a) no rational explanation is ever going to arise in a modern-day setting sans magic and (b) it puts the emphasis squarely upon the individual stories.

What I Want/Don't Want in Science Fiction and Fantasy

2009-12-14T10:57:00.006-07:00

I've been thinking about this topic over the past few months as I've read a lot of different books and short stories in the two genres, written by a wide range of authors.

I've noticed some trends in the types of stories that I've been reading. Note that these aren't necessarily trends among authors. A talented or experienced author might try his or her hand at writing in several of the styles noted below, though I think the hackneyed style appeals mainly to people who are writing serial novels for licensed properties or else are content to rest upon their reputation for a bit and crank out some predictable books for the money.

There are two styles that I don't like in fantasy or science fiction novels. I won't bother to finish a book that clearly falls into either one of these categories. I might finish a short story or watch a film that indulges in them.

Hackneyed
These books are distinguished by two main traits: they don't work hard at all to maintain internal consistency and they don't respect the intelligence of the reader.

By internal consistency, I mean that the authors typically posit some form of magic or technology in the setting that would have much, much broader effects on the society than they describe. They simply haven't thought it through or they have but decided that it doesn't matter.

Another problem with internal inconsistency is related to characters. Characters are placed in positions of power or influence and then proceed to act with complete ignorance of a plethora of facts that 99% of the people placed in those positions would know. This reveals itself in spaceship captains ignorant of how their vessels function, villains with no sense of economics or tactics, and characters who exist mainly to be spoon-fed details of the plot.

These factors play into not respecting the intelligence of the reader. Authors often spoon feed the reader the most basic genre concepts or plot points, often repeatedly, via the mechanism of explaining those points to inept characters. Authors also make the assumption that whatever crazy idea they come up with will simply be accepted by the reader without any rationale.

A lot of science fiction and fantasy on television and film falls into this category. This can be palatable if there's enough action or humor or visual style. But I can rarely stretch my attention to two hours of this approach. It breaks novels for me. Mike Resnick's recent Starship novels fall squarely into this category in my view, as do most serialized novels based on popular movies or roleplaying games. There are always exceptions: John M. Ford's The Final Reflection is a very satisfying science fiction novel that happens to be set in the Star Trek universe.

I understand the reasons for this type of sci-fi and fantasy. Done with flair, it can be a good way to draw in new readers. I just don't care for it myself, because I'm not a new reader anymore. And I don't like it when recent works in this style get widely celebrated as masterpieces of the genre, because they aren't.

Literary Experiments
These are novels that tell a story in a style designed to be confusing, to shake up the reader. The most frustrating thing about these types of novels is that you get the sense that the author could write something much more satisfying and comphrehensible if they wanted to, but that they choose to be vague.

One approach is to use indecipherable language. Sometimes an author that I like will produce one of these and leave me scratching my head. Ian M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn was like that. I just couldn't labor through what the narrator was saying.

Another approach is to use a nonlinear narrative or no clear narrative structure at all. A common tactic is to present many different mysteries or paradoxes in the course of the novel and then explain none of them. Often these novels will suck you in with their clever writing, until you realize that they aren't going to provide anything resembling a satisfying conclusion, much less an explanation of what was happening in chapter four. In my view, Michael Swanwick is the master of this style of throwing out events and ideas without a care for explaining or resolving them, though I have to say that I just don't get Gene Wolfe either.

Some writers like to populate an entire novel with unlikable characters or center the novel on a main character with no discernable redeeming qualities (and I count being interesting or clever as a redeeming quality in this case). I can't think of any reason to do this with a work of fiction other than to try to upset reader's expectations and be daring in some way. M. John Harrison has done this, for example. If I get 100 pages into a book and don't care in any way what happens to any of the characters, then why am I reading it? Alistair Reynolds did this with Revelation Space, but I've found several of his other works less troubling in this regard.

As far as I can tell, writers who produce more than one book of the Literary Experiment style tend to stick with it. And it's the style I'm most likely to hate and whose practitioners most consistently leave me completely cold as a reader. They also tend to win awards, like avant garde types in any creative pursuit.

Unlike the Hackneyed style, I really can't see the point of this style of fiction outside of the short story length. If you want to be weird and obtuse for the sake of being weird and obtuse and conveying some sort of feeling, you can do that at the short story length without punishing your readers. I always get a significant whiff of arrogance from the authors who indulge themselves in this fashion.

Essentially, I believe that the point of writing both fiction and nonfiction is to communicate something coherent to the reader, and nearly all literary experiment novels fail badly on that score with me.

There's another style of science fiction and fantasy that sometimes works for me but fails at a fairly high rate due to the many pitfalls it contains.

Big Idea Obsessions
Science fiction is more prone to this than fantasy, as far as I can tell. There are really two different problems here for me.

The first type of Big Idea novel problem revolves around characters, or rather the lack of interesting, believable characters. A science fiction novel based around a big idea doesn't have to be bereft of well-rounded, intriguing, lifelike characters that you can appreciate as a reader. But oh so many of them are. They plod ahead with cardboard characters and plots that exist only to illuminate the central concept that the author is obsessed with.

This problem has plagued science fiction stories from the beginning of the genre, for the simple reason that some science fiction readers don't care about characters. What they want is a kind of speculative, technical nonfiction disguised as fiction. And that's fine by me. I just have no personal interest in that style. Some very popular writers fall into this category for me.

The character issue can manifest in another way that it less prone to criticism but which utterly fails for me as a reader. The author might create a huge tableau of characters, each seen in a brief glimpse before the narrative moves on to other characters. The result is that as a reader I never feel a connection to any of the multitude of characters tossed onto the scene in pursuit of the Epic Narrative, such as the fulfillment of a prophecy, which in these stories is a stand-in for the Big Idea. This is the type of Big Idea Obsession approach that fantasy is most prone to, although I have seen it the science fiction of authors like Stephen Baxter and Kim Stanley Robinson, whose work draws accolades but generally leaves me cold. I like to have anchor characters who persist over the course of the narrative.

The other Big Idea Obsession problem is the Mighty Technological Gimmick that Makes No Sense while dominating the plot. Some authors come up with an idea that sounds cool but which they are either incapable of explaining or which just doesn't hold together when you look at it closely, as one might over the course of a long novel. Tony Daniels' Metaplanetary was one of the most recent such ideas I've encountered.

A related category is the Mighty Technological Obsession That is Boring or Extraordinarily Technical. When boring, the concept might work in a short story, but can't sustain a novel. Nancy Kress's Probability Moon fell into this category for me, as did Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space, ultimately. When the Obsession is Extraordinarily Technical, well, it's just over my head, I guess, because it never makes sense to me yet I suspect that to someone thoroughly versed in an arcane technical or scientific field it holds together.

Big Idea Obsessions can work for me if the idea holds together and the author surrounds it with some interesting characters.

Some writers are mainly Big Idea Obsession types, framing their stories around the exploration of one big esoteric concept. Larry Niven has both hits and misses in this style, as do Greg Egan, Robert J. Sawyer, and Wil McCarthy. Others bounce around, writing a variety of novel styles. An example would be Greg Bear, who has some excellent Big Idea Obsession novels among his output.

What I Like: Well-Crafted Speculative Storytelling
This approach includes stories that have:

At least one interesting, multi-dimensional fleshed-out character or side that I can care about.
A small group (at most) of point of view characters or a consistent omniscient viewpoint that concentrates on what happens to a fairly small group of characters. Social experiments strongly indicate that people don't make more than four to seven close friends at any point in their lives. Likewise, I don't care about the details of what happens to a dozen or more different characters in a single story or novel.
Good dialogue.
Interesting technology or magic that doesn't dominate the entire story. That sort of thing works much, much better in short stories than novels. If the concept is rich enough, with enough twists and turns to be worthy of novel-length exploration, then it desperately needs to be tied to the types of characters noted above. I don't care so much about how technology or magic affects civilization in the abstract; I care about how it affects people that I've come to care about in some way.
Narratives that start at Point A and end up at Point B, not Point A or Point A-2. Don't loop. Something needs to change.
Novels that offer some sort of resolution to the major challenges that they present during the novel. There can be dangling issues left unresolved, but if you say in the first few chapters that the immediate goal of the characters is X, then by the end of several hundred pages they had damn well better have achieved or failed to achieve X in a clear fashion.
Stories that don't invoke something ridiculous from out of the blue to save the characters and the author.
A sense of wonder and adventure. That's what I read speculative fiction for in the first place.

On the bright side, there are MANY novels like this out there. More really good books than I can read in any given year, with more being written all the time.

And I've learned that most of the writers who have produced some of the novels that I cited as examples of styles I can't stand have written other novels that I thought were great. I can't say with much certainty anymore that "I love author X or loathe author Y." This makes the idea of celebrating a particular writer a little less relevant to me. I celebrate particular stories and books and appreciate authors for having written those specific works.

Perhaps the Internet is an apt metaphor for the current state of fantasy and science fiction. Most of what is on the Internet is crap. It's still full of great stuff. Similarly, there is more bad speculative fiction (in my view) being published and celebrated than I would have thought possible. At the same time, the quantity of Really Good Stories is also tremendous.

So it's a great time to be a fan and a reader, but that doesn't make me any less critical.

Review: The Watchman by Robert Crais

2009-12-09T11:57:00.003-07:00

This is another one of the action/mystery novels by Crais, set in Los Angeles and featuring the main characters Joe Pike and Elvis Cole. Pike is a former Marine, ex-cop, occasional mercenary, and sometimes PI and troubleshooter working with Cole, a private investigator. Pike is stoic, deadly, and taciturn. Cole is garrulous, glib, and tough. The Watchman is primarily a Joe Pike novel, though it does feature Cole and several other characters, like police forensics specialist John Chen, as point of view characters.

In this novel, Pike has to repay a favor from a previous novel and accept a job protecting a spoiled rich girl who caused an auto accident that allowed her to see the face of a dangerous man wanted by the federal authorities. Attempts on her life soon follow, and continue even after Pike is assigned to protect her. But seeing as Pike is not really a bodyguard at heart, he decides that the best strategy is to hunt down the people who are pursuing the girl.

Crais does an excellent job here keeping the events moving at a brisk pace. There aren't that many surprises in terms of the plot: a few twists that don't really knock you off your feet. But the twists and turns do seem to hold up well. Pike does some very dangerous things, but he does them in a very methodical, pragmatic fashion. By surrounding Pike with other characters who are more talkative, neurotic, and witty, Crais both makes Pike's oddness stand out and shows that he can write a variety of characters.

The best part of the story is what it reveals, bit by bit, about Pike's personality and that of Larkin Barkeley, the rich girl he is protecting. Crais takes a character who, on the surface, I've seen in dozens of action movies: the close-lipped badass who you don't want to cross. But he injects him with vulnerabilities, based on Pike's own past as an abused child and his present inability to really connect to most people. This is a guy who, for all his confidence in a crisis situation, is most comfortable when he's silent and unseen. He moves through the world around him almost like a ghost, and there's a sadness to his self-imposed isolation.

It feels as though Crais thought carefully about what kinds of life experiences and mindset would be necessary to create a guy capable of the sorts of action-film deadliness that Pike emanates, and then decided to show what that sort of person would be like in and out of battle. He's not the first person to take this approach; in many ways Pike is an archetypal Warrior, the one who protects the village but cannot truly be part of it. But Crais manages to present Pike with a simple and direct style that feels effortless on the page. I find it well-crafted and an enjoyable read.

Walking Journal, Days Twelve and Thirteen

2009-12-09T10:21:00.002-07:00

On Day 12 I walked to the local Meat Market to get pork chops for dinner. They have some good natural pork produced locally in Idaho that we like. And I didn't want to drive. The roads were pretty icy but the walk went just fine. Really damn cold, though, somewhere around 15 degrees at that time. A bit too close to Overland Road and some other streets that were busier with traffic than I expected.

Walking in areas with automobile traffic is much less relaxing and enjoyable than walking on trails, in the park, or in a more quiet neighborhood. The cars are just ridiculously loud and the exhaust is gross. Not having sidewalks on the neighborhood streets just adds to the "fun."

On Day 13 I walked to the local branch of the library to turn in some books for my wife and daughter. Along the way I met a woman from southern China who was also walking along the street. We had a nice talk and I convinced her that it was actually safer to walk on the banks of the irrigation canal when it was snowy than it was to walk on the streets or sidewalks, where the ice and slush accumulate. And it was. It has been so cold that none of the snow has melted, so the path wasn't muddy or icy. It was about 10 or 12 degrees, thankfully sunny with little breeze.

I got to enjoy a feeling that I couldn't quite identify at first, but now I think I've got it figured out. There are times when we get to be an expert on something that we are very knowledgeable about. That's quite satisfying. But there's another set of circumstances where we receive credit for being informed about something that we really don't know much about, simply because the average person knows even less.

In this case, the woman was quite surprised to find out that I had some rudimentary knowledge of China. I understood that the southern provinces of China are noteworthy for their entrepreneurial spirit and that there are a lot of Chinese from that region spread throughout Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia. Just the fact that I understood that China is a really big place with some very different cultural groups and dialects seemed to surprise her. Also, I was walking to my destination, which she found amazing given the weather and her experiences with Americans in the West.

However, I did fumble one thing. The walk takes us past a field with a horse. There used to be a pair of llamas there as well. I mentioned this and quickly found myself trying to explain what a llama was and what it looked like to someone who had never heard of the animal.

Anyone who knows me can swiftly surmise that I erred on the side of Too Much Information. I don't know if this woman will ever remember that llamas hum to themselves, that they are ferocious spitters, or that they can be used to guard sheep from wolves and coyotes. I'm not sure that my description--"imagine a smaller camel with more hair and ears that stick up"-- was very helpful either.

Anyway, on the way to the library, where I dropped off the books and returned immediately (the walk is a lot slower through the snow and on an icy street), the company helped me ignore the ridiculous cold.

Review: The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

2009-12-07T16:55:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed historical novelist Bernard Cornwell's retelling of the Arthurian legends (The Winter King, Enemy of God, and Excalibur). The Last Kingdom has a similar feel. The first novel describes the early days of King Alfred (before he got the name the Great) as he defends Wessex from the onslaught of the invading Danes and other Vikings, who conquer the other kingdoms of England with surprising swiftness.

Except the story is told not from Arthur's point of view, but from that of Uthred, who is an English earl of Northumbria by birthright but raised as a Viking after being captured in battle as an adolescent. Uthred needs to choose between the adoptive family and culture that he loves and the lost heritage that he feels it is his destiny to reclaim.

Cornwell has a talent for describing wars and battles in a way that lets you understand both the larger movements of soldiers and the individual horror faced by combatants who can feel each other's breath in the press of the shield wall. Just when you think he's celebrating the violence too much via Uthred's reveling in the carnage, he'll pull back and show you the cost, or have a wiser Uthred commenting upon his luck or the fear that he felt.

The story also gives you a good feel for the events shaping the lives of people in England during the time of the Danish invasions and for what motivated them. The differences between the pagan Vikings and the devout Christian English such as Alfred are often stark, with Cornwell revealing a dislike for the hypocrisy of many churchmen through the thoughts and words of his protagonist, Uthred.

Ultimately, it's the way that Cornwell manages to make characters like Uthred and other supporting figures flawed, interesting, and likable enough to root for that makes the novel a good read. The novel is based on historical events, but not all the characters are figures from history, and those without a background in this historical period would probably be hard pressed to figure out which of the minor characters are "real" and which are made up. What this means is that you are never really comfortable as to who is going to die and who will live. That lends a real sense of anxiety and urgency to some of the conflicts. People you've come to like will die in this story, while others may surprise you by surviving.

All in all, a recommended read for fans of historical fiction, those interested in Vikings, and for anyone wanting to set a fantasy piece in this sort of feudal, Iron Age social and technological environment.

Walking Journal Days Nine, Ten, and Eleven

2009-12-07T10:43:00.003-07:00

Well, I fell behind recording these walks but not in keeping up with my walking schedule. On the ninth day I walked to the Hillcrest Library and back, then walked my dog (who is still rehabilitating from knee surgery) down to nearby Borah Park and back, for 40 minutes total.

On the tenth day my wife and I walked around downtown Boise looking at Christmas lights as we celebrated the anniversary of our first date (albeit a few days late). Then we had a delicious sushi dinner and walked back to the car. A total of 30 minutes for the first walk and 10 for the walk back to the car. It was cold!

Yesterday was day eleven, and I walked along the canal down to Cole Road and back through the open fields behind Bishop Kelly High School's football and baseball practice fields, coming back up through Borah Park. A nice 33 minutes overall. Cold again, but clear.

Today should be an interesting walk, because it snowed last night and it is still snowing now. Temperature was 18 degrees this morning while I shoveled half my driveway, which I'm going to have to shovel again. Argh! In a while I'm will trudge out to the meat market and get some stuff for dinner and trudge back. I need to get some real, waterproof snow boots. I have the other cold weather gear I need (could use another pair of lined jeans), but I only have a pair of hiking boots and no matter how often I treat them with waterproofing compound they flat out suck in the snow.

At least I got the kids to school on time and without any incidents in spite of the snowy roads. This is the time of year that my wife wakes up in the morning and peeks out the windows to see if it has snowed, then tries to conceal evidence of snow from me so that I'll actually get up. After eight years up here I am still not a big snow guy. I don't mind it so much if I don't have to drive in it (except shoveling my driveway, which has enough cracks in it to keep me from going more than a foot or two without hitting something that stops the shovel cold). But I run a lot of the errands--driving kids to and from school and piano practice, getting the groceries, and so forth--so it seems I'm always out in the snow several times a day.

I think snow is probably more attractive, though more daunting in some ways, in an environment that is more pedestrian and mass transit friendly than one dominated by cars. When the snow blankets everything, it's cool and serene. When cars turn the snow on the roads into black, icy slush that sprays everywhere and refreezes into brown slicks of ice, it's not so lovely.

Stop Painting Tiger Woods as the Victim

2009-12-04T20:25:00.003-07:00

I've tried to ignore all the recent hoopla about Tiger Woods, his car accident, and the fact that it was the result of a fight with his wife precipitated by the fact that she found out Woods cheated on her.

But I do listen to sports radio occasionally, and the shills for ESPN bending over backwards to defend Tiger have gotten ridiculous. Yesterday I was subjected to a reporter attacking goofy Scandanavian golfer Jesper Parnevik for expressing regret that he introduced Tiger and Elin Nordegren to each other and suggesting that next time she might try using a driver on him. The reporter tried to sound as appalled as possible and spun her reaction by saying that such comments were just cruel to Elin by keeping the public spectacle public.

Uh, I think that public shaming and ridicule is exactly what is supposed to happen when somebody does something as asinine as cheating on his wife. Especially when that someone is as rich and influential as Woods. He's not going to be harmed any other way but in the court of public opinion.

And who thinks that will last? He's going to stay rich, remain popular with his rabid fans, and be forgiven by the public the next time he wins a major or cuts a check to charity.

This is just part of the normal cycle of shaming and humiliation that anybody who does something like this and gets caught faces in their social circle as a result of their bad behavior, be that immediate family, coworkers, or friends. People talk about them both behind their backs and to their faces. They get mocked and joked about.

It just so happens that because Woods is a major public figure worldwide, his "circle" is vast and thus the shaming process takes place very publicly. And Woods has clearly pursued this iconic status by accepting huge amounts of money to endorse products that have nothing to do with his sport and everything to do with how people perceive his character.

That being said, I have no personal interest in reading about Woods or his marriage. I don't care about his dirty laundry. Certainly if he shows contrition and mends his ways he will deserve forgiveness.

But it irritates me to have people waving his dirty laundry around and proclaiming that it's really clean as a whistle. And forgiving somebody before they've really been punished is a great way to ensure that rich, powerful, arrogant people remain rich, powerful and arrogant. Everyone should have to face some consequences when they do something stupid.

Just let the man take his deserved lumps for being an ass and stop acting like he is the injured party in this whole affair.

Walking Journal Day Eight

2009-12-03T18:43:00.003-07:00

Well, today I walked again in the park downtown, heading onto the Boise State Campus to look at the computer offerings at the BSU BroncoTec store. That took 12 minutes. Then I walked another 30 minutes along the river and back toward the main library, where I picked up a book illustrating spaceship drive proposals such as magnetic sails and nuclear pulse engines.

No pictures, but I did notice MANY more people out walking when I started at 1:30 pm as opposed to 8:45 am, which I found interesting. I mean, if you work a regular job, you're still in the office at 1:30 in the afternoon, right? I sort of like the more solitary walks, to be honest. When there are a lot of other people around, I realize how slow I am. :-)

Walking Journal Day Seven

2009-12-02T21:40:00.005-07:00

Today I walked for 50 minutes along the Boise River. A nice walk all around, kept a good pace up, enjoyed it a great deal. Cold though, and tomorrow morning promises to be even colder.

Along the way I entered the grounds of the MK Nature Center and walked around a bit. This gave me a chance to snap a shot of yet another bridge:

I like the way this bridge bends around. Reminds me that life's path is not always straight.

I also saw this fun object:

The nearby sign says that this is a "Bat Box" designed to encourage bats to nest in an area so that they will eat nocturnal bugs. I just love this idea for some reason. A Bat Box instead of a bird house.

Annoyances at Age Extremes

2009-12-02T11:26:00.002-07:00

I found myself getting irritated the last two mornings due to encounters with people at the opposite ends of the age spectrum.

There is a young girl in my son's highly gifted elementary school class who I can safely say, after being in her presence approximately once a week during the past two school years, should be the inspiration for the next truly awful, spoiled, rotten young girl in the next Roald Dahl-style book or film. She's the sort of kid that I really have to struggle not to take into a corner and have a talking to, because she's bossy, greedy, rude, and lazy. She consistently contributes next to nothing to activities except snarky comments and sloppy work. And she ignores directions. The only person who has some influence on her seems to be the classroom teacher.

All of this really stands out because the other kids in the class are pretty good. Some are silly or goofy or distractible, but after the teacher had a discussion about bullying, there's no one else as mean as this little girl, who is clearly deliberate and careful in her nastiness. Maybe her parents are doing the best they possibly can, but I suspect they could do a hell of a lot better. I really, truly hope she is not in my son's class again for a third year. Probably she'll be the next Sarah Palin.

The other annoying experience was with a white-haired driver. I pulled out of the main library parking lot, making a left turn into the center lane because a lot of traffic was coming the opposite way and I didn't want to block anybody wanting to turn right from the lot, because those lanes were empty. I sat there waiting in the center lane while a line of cars drove by.

Then, as an opening appeared, this old guy pulled out and made a left hand turn around my car. If I hadn't seen him in my rearview mirror I would have pulled right into him. And he's looking at me and shaking his head in disgust as he does so. It took him longer to make the turn than it would have taken me to merge, so the opening that I saw ended up with him cutting off the car behind him--who wanted into the center lane to make a turn.

So I got ahead of that car and then, as I passed the old guy at a light up ahead (I was turning at the light and he was at the back of a line of cars going straight), I leaned over and flipped him and his passenger off.

I'm not proud of that reaction. It didn't teach him a lesson and it gave me only some temporary relief, at the cost of feeding negative emotions.

With the girl in my son's class, I try to keep an even tone and speak carefully around her, even when she's being a brat. But I'm pretty sure she knows I don't like her, because I correct her a lot and she tries to argue, even when other kids agree with my point.

With the old guy in the car, who's much closer in age to me than this girl is, I think I snapped because my mind said, "damn it, he should know better. He's had his chances to learn." Still didn't make it worth my emotional energy.

Don't know why, but bringing it up feels a little cathartic.

Walking Journal Day Six

2009-12-01T17:46:00.003-07:00

Well, I forgot my camera this morning. I don't know if the pictures would have come out well or not--I went to Camelback Park and hiked around the packed dirt trails up and down its steep hills for forty-five minutes in 30 degree weather that was very different from yesterday's bright blue skies.

The fog was very heavy this morning and the section of Boise that normally spreads out before your eyes like the overhead views of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, full of neat little houses surrounded by trees, was swallowed up instead.

At first I imagined some great beast exhaling steam that crept in and hid the streets and buildings from view. Here be monsters.

Later in the walk I looked back toward the top of a hill I had just left behind a couple minutes earlier, and it was cloaked in mist. Then some sort of construction machine started up down below, its diesel engine chuffing invisibly. After a minute or so there was a clanking sound that I associate with the slow movement of tank treads from World War II movies. The magical fog of a few minutes before was transformed into the fog of war.

I still couldn't see anything, but I let myself flow with it and for a few tense breaths I waited for something sinister and mechanical to emerge from the fog below the bluff on which I stood, the tips of my boots at the edge. But it never came into view.

So another good walk, though I forget to take my allergy medicine this morning and didn't get back home to do so until the late afternoon, so I'm paying for my excursion a bit right now.

Review: In the Land of Invented Languages

2009-12-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

The subtitle of this book tells you pretty much everything you need to know about its contents. Okrent, a linguist, explores both contemporary and historical attempts to create artificial languages.

For each primary language that she explores, she provides not only a brief biography of its inventor (longer in some cases, such as that of the troubled man who invented the symbolic language Blissymbolics), but examples of the language in use. So you get various phrases written in English and translated into Esperanto, Klingon, and so forth. Moreover, you often get an intermediate translation, which shows what is literally being said before moving on to the smoother, "natural English" version.

The fundamental flaw faced by nearly everyone who has tried or is trying to create an artificial language from scratch is that they want to make a language that is superior in some fashion to languages that have developed organically over time.

They want their new languages to be more logical, more emotional, simpler to learn, easier to pronounce or spell, impossible to lie in, or some such goal. Often they based these goals on a belief in certain universal linguistic principles that their language will display more effectively than any others.

The problem, of course, is that their new languages usually make much more sense to the creator than to anybody else. And the new languages tend to promote schisms among their adopters at a startlingly early stage in the process, often when they have only a few hundred users at most.

And even when there is success with creating languages that are inherently more logical and precise, such as Loglan, a key problem arises: it is just too damn hard to figure out how to say anything in the natural flow of a conversation. People have to think too hard and in somewhat unnatural ways to communicate adequately. In other words, many of these ideal artificial languages assume a clarity of thought and intent that real people cannot live up to in the actual world. It turns out that while many people want to blame the limitations of language for our difficulties in communicating with each other, much of the problem resides within our own minds. "Natural" languages (I don't think the term is entirely accurate, as it seems to me that all spoken human languages are artificial in origin, but it suits how we tend to think about language) work in large part because they are flexible enough to deal with our own fuzzy thinking.

My favorite part of the book came at the very end, when Okrent describes the constructed language or "conlang" community, which consists of people who make up rigorous, linguistically accurate languages for fun, often basing them on elements borrowed from many different obscure terrestrial languages or coming up with really esoteric ideas suited to alien species. I don't think I'd want to do the work that those people put into their hobby, but I can appreciate the creativity and discipline that it takes. Some of the results, such as the squirrel language Dritok, which consists of clicks, pops, hisses, and snorts, sound very entertaining.

An interesting book, though not one I'd read if I was pondering the idea of creating a new language for the betterment of humanity, because the text is littered with the broken sentences of those who tried and failed.

Walking Journal Day Five

2009-11-30T19:06:00.004-07:00

This morning was chilly but crisp, with a bright blue sky, not much of a breeze, and a temperature around 30 F. I dropped the kids off at school and then went to Ann Morrison Park downtown. Walked for about 35 minutes, not counting a couple minutes of time lost to snapping photos.

First off, yet another bridge! This picture came out better than I expected, given that I have no real talent for photography.

I really like pedestrian or "walking" bridges a lot. The slight curvature, the freedom of movement across an otherwise impassable or challenging space, the views, and the fact that pedestrian bridges tend to be so much quieter than those open to automobile traffic.

One of the little creeks that runs through Ann Morrison Park has thin layer of ice over it. A flock of seagulls ("I ran, I ran so far awaaaaay--" sorry) were hanging out on the ice.

I thought this was really cool, for some reason. Just the idea that these birds that spend so much time flying over an ocean that is always in motion walking around on top of a slick sheet of frozen water was interesting. I wonder what they think about the contrast, if they think about it at all.

A Little Football

2009-11-30T16:28:00.004-07:00

As it stands today in college football, undefeated TCU is almost certainly going to get an automatic bid into one of the prestigious (and monetarily very rewarding for their participants) BCS bowl games at the end of the year. Should Boise State go undefeated by beating a pathetic NMSU team next week, they will probably be left out of the BCS.

For the second year in a row.

By the way, these two teams played last year and TCU won by a single point, 17-16. There's not a lot of difference between them.

BSU gets knocked for its strength of schedule. Its signature win this season is over the University of Oregon, who are on the verge of winning the PAC-10 and who currently sit at 7th in the AP and BCS polls, one spot behind BSU.

But I think it's a little sketchy to say that TCU beat 3 Top 25 teams, which is what they get credit for doing by beating Utah, BYU, and Clemson. Currently, only BYU and Clemson are ranked in the AP Top 25 (Clemson by the skin of its overrated teeth, at 25th), and only BYU is in the BCS Top 25. Oregon is much better than any of those teams.

TCU benefits heavily from the fact that the Mountain West gets vastly more respect than the WAC, based largely upon the current reputations of the trio of TCU, BYU, and Utah.

Those three teams are a combined 31-5 this year. By comparison, the top three teams in the WAC (BSU, Nevada, and Fresno State), are 27-8. And those 8 losses include losses to BSU twice (ranked 6th), Cincinnati (Ranked 5th), Wisconsin (ranked 20th at one point), and Notre Dame (back when they were ranked 23rd). The MWC ranked losses include TCU twice (ranked 4th), Oregon (ranked 7th), and BYU (sitting at 14th right now).

Marque wins? Aside from playing each other, you have BYU's fluke win over a stunned Oklahoma team minus its quarterback, TCU's win over Clemson (uh, okay), and Utah's win over . . . well, nobody. Utah didn't have a signature win over a ranked team this year.

Of couse, neither did Nevada or Fresno State.

Still, that's not a tremendous separation. Moreover, Utah lost to the two ranked teams it played--which happened to be BYU and TCU in its own conference. Nevada began the season in a coma and then went on a tear. I'm not convinced that the current Utah team is any better than Nevada in terms of talent; their wins this season are no more impressive. The Utes are largely living off of the buzz of their bowl win over Alabama.

But this perception of the MWC as being a far superior conference lets TCU play two ranked teams in conference, and that's a huge edge for them in the BCS calculations.

Those who say, "The Broncos should just schedule tougher teams" have no idea how difficult that is for a good mid-major type school.

BSU would gladly move into the MWC, and the topic comes up every season. But the MWC commissioners run away from that suggestion like it was on fire. They like the little niche they have somehow carved for themselves without adding any other competition.

Since a merger is unlikely, perhaps we could solve this perception issue by having BSU play BYU and Utah in nonconference every season? Home and away? It surely doesn't involve much in the way of travel and makes great regional sense. That way BSU can get the same schedule benefits that TCU enjoys, while leaving open a nonconference date to try and score a higher profile opponent. And if BSU loses those games, then the argument over relative quality is settled on the football field.

That being said, I think TCU is probably a little better than BSU this season and I hope they do well in whatever BCS matchup they are rewarded with. I have no dislike for the Horned Frogs. It's the system that gives out automatic berths to unimpressive ACC champs (and weak Big East champs, most years) that is flawed.

More Conservative Christian Inanity

2009-11-30T13:20:00.002-07:00

While looking for items for my daughter's wish list on Amazon, I stumbled across this review of the Bionicles books from Lego by a woman identifying herself as a Christian home-schooling her children.

"Not only are these Bionicle figures and their stories filled with dark images of death and cruelty, the paranormal, occult aspects are very liberally seen throughout the books. This dark world comes with an entire alternate reality, including it's own language, geography, religion and politics. It is very easy for boys of any age to get all caught in this dark world and the consequences could be very disturbing. . . .

We are Christians who teach our children the Bible and undoubtedly my son could sense how the themes of Bionicles were very different than those we were teaching at home and what he was hearing at church.

My advice is that ALL parents thoroughly review the Bionicle books before giving them to your children to read. My previous work in the field of child counseling showed me that children of today have enough problems with dark thoughts and tendencies (ie. the skyrocketing rates of childhood depression and suicide, boys getting "lost" in fantasy worlds, etc.) and do not need books with dark themes.

Christian parents who value raising children with a biblical worldview might well consider avoiding the Bionicle series as it will send messages that will conflict with views you desire your children to grow up with."

I don't even know where to start with this sort of earnest, well-intentioned, yet ultimately simple-minded and ironic (see Bible comments below) fearmongering.

I've heard rising divorce rates and environmental stress associated with higher urbanization and the fast pace of the information age mentioned as possible contributions to adolescent depression. Even video games and violence on television. But this is the first time I've heard someone blame fantasy worlds based on books stimulating the imagination. When I was a kid, that's the very thing that helped me FIGHT depression.

Bionicles might be potentially annoying to adults who haven't gotten into the setting as much as their kids, but they are hardly harbringers of a dark, occult worldview. I have no idea what to say to someone who is shocked that a book might do something as crazy as provide a detailed, alternate world of imagination. Perish the thought. Though I have to say, I'm pretty sure the world this woman lives in has its own language, history, politics, and religion compared to the world that I live in.

The BIBLE is loaded with more violence (wholesale slaughter left and right), cruelty (it condones slavery and sacrifice), and mature themes (multiple wives, spousal coveting, and so forth) than you will find in the Bionicle books. And plenty of stuff in the Bible is patently made up, should you choose to take it literally. So I'm puzzled as to how reading Bionicle books and playing with toys that require you to assemble them will warp them compared to intensive Bible study. And unlike the supposed "cult" inspired by Bionicle books, many people devoted to biblical teachings have actually murdered and repressed other people in massive numbers in the past as well as today.

I had some more stuff to suggest what is more likely to contribute to eventual depression among kids home-schooled in a narrow minded, conservative Christian worldview once they eventually encounter the diversity of the larger world and have to deal with arguments based on facts, but honestly I hope that her kids grow up happy and healthy.

Review: Astro Boy Movie

2009-11-30T05:44:00.000-07:00

Saw this film yesterday with the kids at a local "dollar cinema." Of course a dollar cinema doesn't cost a dollar anymore, but this one is reasonably priced and pretty clean, and five minutes from our house.

As for the movie itself, the kids liked it. My seven year old son was particularly entertained and enjoyed all the action sequences. My ten year old daughter, who has read some of the Astro Boy manga in translation, thought it was fine, but wondered why they made so many changes to the storyline of the manga.

Ah, the ageless question of why adaptations make the changes that they do to stories that we love. Although I can't say that I cared a lot about Astro Boy one way or the other coming in.

The film's narrative is very simplistic. The villains are foolishly and almost pointlessly villainous, the comic relief is slapstick, and the whole question of how humans should interact with intelligent beings that they have essentially enslaved is sort of waved at in passing. There's probably more action than necessary. You won't get any insights into human dependency upon technology or the emotions of robots as you do in Wall-E. As far as the animation, it's fine but not breathtaking in any way; the characters are cartoonishly exaggerated but without much subtlety of expression, kind of like a big screen Jimmy Neutron film with less humor.

All in all, not a film I'd recommend seeing or renting unless you have younger kids interested in it. Then it's not bad to sit through as far as such things go. The enthusiasm of children can compensate for a lot of visual and narrative shortcomings.

Walking Journal Day Four

2009-11-29T17:25:00.008-07:00

Today was a little rushed. I wanted to go down to the hike and bike trails where they run by the Boise River and then swing by the main branch of the public library. Movie plans with the kids sort of cramped my time more than I intended. I did manage to get down there, but wasn't really feeling very relaxed as I rushed through the last ten minutes checking my watch, hoping I'd make it back in time to get the kids to the movie matinee. (I did.)

However, I did see some nice things. Starting with this old railroad bridge that was converted to a pedestrian bridge. (It's located near the Anne Frank Memorial, which I will photograph on another walk.)
Not sure what the symbolism is of my encountering and wanting to take pictures of bridges and tunnels, but there it is.

Crossing the bridge, I saw this neat old tree by the Boise River:

As my poem Giants might suggest, I've always like big old trees. I especially enjoyed how this one seems to claim it's own little piece of ground as the river swirls around it. Given that the river is at a low ebb right now, this tree must be pretty tough. I'll try to remember to take a picture of it in the spring.

And then, crossing the Friendship Bridge from the Boise State Campus side of the river back into Julia Davis Park, I saw something rather unusual in downtown Boise: a pair of deer. They were trotting along at first, looking kind of skittish. I waited until they settled down and got close enough to get an okay photo of them.

Seeing the bridge and the tree and the deer made the first half of my walk pleasant, though I managed to distract myself with time concerns just five minutes later! I'm glad I went today, because I wouldn't have seen the deer otherwise.

As for the walk itself, I walked 30 minutes and had some odd soreness in my right ankle and one strange muscle spasm in my left calf that hurt like an SOB for about 15 seconds. Then it got better. On the fourth day I have a few more aches, specifically some heel pain, than I expected after something as moderate as daily walking, but I will have to figure out how to adjust to it. Hopefully a third straight night of doing yoga will help a bit.

Review: The Renaissance at War

2009-11-29T09:18:00.000-07:00

If you like military history or are interested in the wave of change that swept through Europe as a result of the Renaissance, then this book by Yale historian Thomas Arnold is a real treat.

In less than 250 pages, Arnold deals with a large amount of material in a very accessible fashion.

Chapter One, "The New Fury," describes the impact of the gunpowder revolution, specifically the introduction of artillery, on European sieges and fortifications. Arnold includes multiple sidebars that help the reader decipher the bewildering array of Renaissance military pieces and the key differences between them (culverins have longer barrels than cannons, with a thicker base that allowed them to use heavier powder charges and fire at longer ranges). You get a sense of the range of artillery, how much gunpowder and shot it used, and how difficult and costly it was to transport over distances. Then there is a good discussion of how fortifications had to change to withstand assaults by the new cannons.

Chapter 2, "The New Legions," discusses how infantry and cavalry were altered to adapt to the needs and capabilities of gunpowder weapons. This chapter brought up many points of which I was unaware. For example, military drums were a Renaissance innovation designed to provide a strict cadence needed for densely packed squares of pikemen and musketeers to march and manuever in unison while providing flanking fire for each other. Arnold also makes the point that the introduction of guns themselves didn't necessitate all the changes that took place. Early guns were less accurate than crossbows; someone could have instituted many of the Renaissance battlefield changes adopted for firearms without guns, based on equipping large numbers of soldiers with heavy crossbows, whose bolts could pierce armor.

But the early guns were cheaper to make and use than crossbows (which I did not realize, assuming that gunpowder was more costly than it apparently was), faster and easier to use (since they weren't aimed and reloading was apparently a simpler and speedier process than using a small winch to rewind a heavy crossbow), and possibly more intimidating (with a shock and awe effect of noise, flash, and smoke that crossbows lacked). So it was both more affordable and more feasible to equip large numbers of soldiers with the new weapons. Ironically, once this was done, it became necessary to institute new methods of drill, many originally inspired by Classical Roman training manuals, to put the large numbers of musketeers to good use.

This is also the first text I've read with a decent discussion of the design and uses of war wagons, which were a common feature of warfare in Eastern Europe (particularly among the Hussites). Not a lengthy discussion, but much more informative and easier to find than the coverage in every other general source that I've read. Since this was an interest of mine, I was quite happy.

These two chapters alone made the book a treat for me to read. Chapter 3, "The New Caesars," gives an interesting description of the changes to the battlefield role of the nobility and of military commanders during the period, which is helpful to anyone trying to envision what a battlefield of the period was like and how knighthood transformed.

Chapter 4, "Cross versus Crescent," describes the ongoing wars between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire for control of the eastern European frontier, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. Good reading, supplemented with some very cool and very readable color diagrams of several key sieges and battles.

The last two chapters, "Dueling Kings" and "Faith vs. Faith," are about the conflict between the Hapsburgs and the Valois kings of France on the one hand and between Protestants and Catholics on the other. These were well-written, but not particular interests of mine, so I didn't give them as thorough a read.

Overall, this is a portable, concise, informative, and attractive reference to the key military transformations of the period.

Walking Journal Day Three

2009-11-28T10:09:00.008-07:00

Today it was much sunnier, but the temperature was actually a few degrees colder, close to freezing. Still, without the same breeze and with the direct sunlight, I felt warmer on my walk, almost a bit too hot. Headed out in the morning in the neighborhood and walked for 30 minutes.

Here's a look at the brand-new school (built last year) that's a five-minute walk from our house (assuming one of our neighbors lets us cut through his yard, as he always did when Will attended kindergarten at the old school that was torn down). I give you Grace Jordan Elementary:

It's a very nice looking school, with a big playground area that I did a terrible job of capturing in the next photo due to the angle of the sunlight, which was blindingly bright:

(Hey, I think I got my thumb in there!) Yep, I wouldn't have to drive a 45 minute round-trip twice a day if my kids attended this school. Wouldn't even have to start the car. Would undoubtedly save a lot on gas money.

However, I think this is probably pretty fair, all things considered. My kids were fortunate enough to both qualify for a special highly gifted program that puts them in small classes with great teachers and a challenging group of peers. It's not perfect, but it has given us a lot of wonderful opportunities for the kids and introduced us to some great people. So on the big karma wheel of life, I feel that there should be some inconvenience attached to our receiving such a blessing.

Right next to the elementary school is a pedestrian bridge that crosses Overland Road. When the new school was built, they held a contest, and a majority of the kids wanted to name the new school Skybridge, which is cool, but the Board of Education ignored the kids and went with a name honoring some local person I've never heard about. Important to teach those kids early on that their input doesn't really count for important decisions, just things like the People's Choice Awards. Here are a couple photos of the Skybridge:

On windy days the bridge sort of hums. For some reason there was a squirrel running around up here who sprinted off when I approached.

This is a shot of the eastbound traffic on Overland. Not very busy on a Saturday morning. I may try this again later when there's snow on the ground.

A good walk overall, even if the neighborhood is a bit familiar.

Review: Muse of Fire by Dan Simmons

2009-11-28T08:58:00.000-07:00

Dan Simmons has an uncanny ability to write well in any genre. Muse of Fire is a science fiction novella about a wandering troupe of Shakespearian actors known as Earth's Men. They travel about the stars in a distant, bleak future where humanity lives under the rule of a hierarchy of mysterious and powerful set of alien overlords.

In this setting, the human race is divided into arbeiters, who perform manual labor, doles, who are gray-hearted and somber clerks, and the dragomen, who are sexless, genetically altered translators for the Archon, large arthropods who are the immediate overlords of mankind. The crew of the Muse of Fire don't seem to fit into any of these categories and it is isn't clearly explained why not, though the narrator is one of the few humans who comes from Earth, which is a blasted, desolate planet filled with the billions of sarcophagi of generations of dead humans, who are returned to their ancestral homeworld by their alien overlords upon death.

In the middle of a performance on one backwater world, the Earth's Men draw the wholly unexpected attention of an audience of Archons. They are then sent on a breakneck journey to perform a new play for each of the alien races who control the known universe. First they perform Macbeth for the Archons, then King Lear for the amphibious Poimen, then Hamlet for the colossal and terrifying Demiurgos, and finally Romeo and Juliet for the mighty deity Abraxas.

It is a strange journey, full of dazzling imagery and mysteries that remain mysteries to the largely befuddled human crew. Along the way, Simmons manages to give a pretty good description of the various personalities found in the theater and this particular troupe, coupled with asides relating to various aspects of Shakespeare's plays and the roles therein.

Knowing Simmons, but having only slight familiarity with gnosticism, I'm confident that there are many layers of symbolic meaning to the names and choices for the various alien hierarchy and the odd religion that the human race follows. However, not being able to appreciate the full depth of such aspects did not impair my enjoyment of the story, which kept me reading past my bedtime to get to the end.

In somewhat classic Simmons fashion, there's no real sense of the ramifications of the changes that take place as a result of the events in the story, either for the individual characters or for humanity as a whole. But it is quite clear that significant change has occurred.

I don't know that I would buy this book as a stand-alone novella unless I found it for a good price. But the story is included in Gardner Dozois' anthology The New Space Opera, so you can get it there along with a lot of other interesting stories.

Walking Journal Day Two

2009-11-27T13:41:00.006-07:00

Thought I'd try keeping a log of my daily walks. After battling a bunch of aches and pains the past few months, I'm starting the RealAge Workout, which is a bit milder than my previous workout schedule. The Phase 1 goal is to walk at least half an hour every day for 30 consecutive days. I'm modifying that slightly by adding a brief Movement Prep routine (about five minutes) taken from Core Fitness, and hopefully adding some yoga as often as possible.

The first walk was actually on Thanksgiving, with the family. We walked about 50 minutes along the river downtown.

Today I walked to the local branch of our library, at Hillcrest Shopping center. The majority of the walk was on the irrigation canals in our neighborhood. It's a fairly relaxing way to walk, albeit a bit muddy this time of year. The temperature was in the mid-30s, with some occasional drizzle. Here's a shot that shows how some of the water remaining in the canal has frozen over.

This walk normally takes about 14 minutes straight from my door, so I modified it by walking down to the local highschool and picking up the canal route there. It still ended up being too short by about 12 minutes, so I walked across the enormous parking lot behind the shopping center until I got to 30 minutes. Then it was another 13 minutes or so to walk home after a break to browse the shelves.

I never noticed it before, but this parking lot is rather large considering that it is almost always empty except for a handful of cars and an occasional delivery truck. Here's a shot:

I have to wonder what the people building the shopping center were thinking. Probably that there would be enough business that employees of the various businesses here would have to use this back entrance parking instead of parking out front. But from what I've seen, that's not the case.

Still, I'd rather walk through this lot than the front of the shopping center. It has one of those crappy dollar stores, a cosmetology store, a liquor store, a poorly aging Albertson's grocery store that we don't shop at, another discount shop of some sort selling crappy stuff, and a Payless Shoe Store that we patronize sometimes when the kids need shoes.

The library is tucked into a corner in the back, a bastion of relative serenity.

Review: Purple and Black

2009-11-27T08:35:00.005-07:00

This fantasy is an epistolary novella, told entirely through the letters written between Nicephorus, the young and recently crowned ruler of the Vesani empire, and Phormio, an old school chum who has been sent to the embattled frontier more for his loyalty to the embattled emperor than as a result of any personal qualifications.

As is apparently in keeping with Parker's other fantasy works, this is more of a historical fantasy about an alternative world without magic, strange creatures, or wondrous landscapes. It's a highly political story, focused on the machinations of individuals in an old, corrupt imperial bureaucracy trying to acquire or preserve power and authority. And it is ultimately a tragic story of friendship, youthful idealism, and betrayal.

The conceit of telling the story through letters works well because the letters themselves are typically brief and to the point. There are some twists and turns that gave themselvs away a bit earlier than I would have liked, but the development of Phormio and Nicephorus's characters is handled well, with little bits of their backstory emerging.

The setting felt odd to me: clearly everyone is fighting at a high medieval level, with armor, swords, and so forth. Yet there are sections in the story where it is made quite clear (in fact, it is key to the plot) that there is a rather sophisticated record-keeping apparatus in place within the empire, to the degree that every piece of armor mass-produced by certain companies receives its own lot number. And books seem to be quite commonplace, at least among the elite. There are references to specific editions of multiple works and of texts updated over decades. All of this lends a somewhat more modern feel to what is otherwise a lower-tech society. I'm not sure how well it works; at times it felt anachronistic, even given that this is a make-believe world.

On the other hand, it did make me want to check on whether the Roman Empire or one of the Chinese dynasties employed such detailed and well-organized record-keeping for military matters.

I wouldn't spend the $20 or so to buy a hardcover of this novella; it's just too slight of a story for that sort of outlay unless you are a big K.J. Parker fan (this is the first of her books that I've read). However, the story is well worth reading if you can find it at the library or perhaps someday included in an anthology.

Review: Night Watch by Sean Stewart

2009-11-24T17:27:00.003-07:00

This is one of those incomplete reviews I write every so often when I make it a significant way into a book (at least 150 pages or so) but just can't find the interest or enthusiasm in me to finish reading.

The book in question is Night Watch by Sean Stewart, a writer who has received high praise for other novels such as Resurrection Man, Perfect Circle, and Galveston. This is the first book of his that I tried to read, and I think I may have picked one of his less successful efforts.

Stewart writes some beautifully evocative prose, and that's what kept me reading as long as I did. I found the dialogue less successful, but enjoyable at times. The setting just did not hold together well for me, and the plotting was uneven at best. The experience of reading the novel was akin to that of watching an artsy version of an action movie made by a gifted cinematographer and a below-average director.

Throughout the book I had the feeling that I had picked up the second or even the third book in a series, one in which all the characters have already been introduced and a certain amount of their intertwined personal histories played out. However, though this novel is set in the same broad setting as Resurrection Man, in which magic is reintroduced to the world following World War II, it apparently takes place long after the events in the earlier novels.

Two hundred pages into this book I couldn't tell you who the main characters were or what exactly their goals were aside from "try to save Vancouver's Chinatown from destruction" for a number of them. I didn't come across any characters that I liked with the possible exception of Wire and Ant-something-or-other, and I really didn't care what happened to any of them.

As far as the unusual setting, a future that mixes various levels of technology with the presence of uncontrolled magical forces, I have no real sense of how magic is supposed to work in this setting, which is always a problem for me, though not for everyone. Magic without limits or rules communicated in some fashion to the reader becomes, in my view, a plot device that is too easy to abuse.

More significantly, I don't know how the people in this setting really view magic. There are a bunch of tough, militaristic white Canadians who are supposed to have a very rational view of the world because they've pushed the magic away into one corner of their city. This seems kind of unbelievable to me, but the real shocker was having a character named Claire, whose mother was a Hawk Goddess called the Harrier, express skepticism about the "superstitious" nature of the Chinatown inhabitants. I would think that her own origins would have cured her of any such traits. And the people of Chinatown are afraid of these white techno-magical cyborg soldiers they've hired as mercenaries, but it's patently obvious that these guys are no match for the magical "Gods" or Powers that live in and around Chinatown.

Ultimately I didn't finish the novel because I didn't trust the author to answer any of the questions that I was interested in. There's a scene where Stewart goes on for at least six pages about a character's efforts to build a fire to save himself. Now, to begin with, I was not invested in that character at that point in the narrative. Even if I was, six pages of him repeating the same basic actions over and over to stave off the cold and get a fire lit was severe overkill. And then the character disappears, at least for the next 100+ pages that I bothered to read. Why on Earth invest that much narrative and reader effort in the struggles of a bit character who is only going to disappear?

Later on, Stewart sets up a scene when several characters are about to embark upon a dangerous attempt to save the life and possibly the soul of a man trapped by demons. Their main resources are the fighting experience of a 95 year old man and the magic sword that his son has brought him. Then Stewart chooses to skip over that scene entirely. We rejoin the characters after they have completed the mission successfully.

The experience of those two scenes encapsulated much of the novel for me. Pages of descriptive prose spent upon topics that I would have happily devoted at most a paragraph of my attention to, and a complete overlooking of various scenes that would have interested me.

I think that in this novel this tendency to toss key scenes "off-screen" and spend time on odd little exchanges goes beyond a quirky choice to emphasize certain literary elements over "less sophisticated" action sequences. It's more like the novel just has no focus, no sense that when you set up the audience to anticipate a big confrontation and then just blow it off as an afterthought, you're toying with them. It felt like a bait and switch. If he wanted to write an atmospheric novel about unlikable characters in a dreamlike setting, I don't think he should have included the military aspects and the battle for the city, because they just don't work here.

Based on his reputation, I'd like to give another Stewart novel a try, but it will be a while before I bother to get around to it. I think I'd rather read a book of poetry by Stewart as opposed to a book of prose.

Review: The Spirit, Vol. I by Darwyn Cooke

2009-11-19T10:12:00.004-07:00

The Spirit is a classic comic book character created by the legendary Will Eisner. The Spirit has no super-powers or even much in the way of a costume, as you can see in this picture.

He's basically a cross between a hard-boiled private detective and a costumed street-level vigilante. Like the classic vigilante, he wears a mask, doesn't carry a gun, does his fighting with his fists, and has a rogue's gallery of very offbeat characters. Like a private eye, he gets smacked around a lot, has a wise-cracking sense of humor, uses his wits and contacts to follow up on cases, and deals with a lot of femme fatales. (This collection even has a story featuring the Batman and the Spirit, so you can see the contrasts between them.

Artist and writer Darwyn Cooke has brought the Spirit back in a recent series. I picked this up on a whim, and I was startled at how well done it is.

You might be familiar with Cooke's work on the DC Elseworlds mini-series Final Frontier, which reimagined the emergence of the Silver Age heroes of the DC universe in a 1950s that was truer to the politics of the time than contemporary comics were. The comics were also turned into a DC Animated-style movie. I found The New Frontier interesting but not particularly inspiring, to be honest. And I thought the ending was rather confusing and a bit cliched.

This new Spirit series just crackles with energy and style, however. Cooke's art is crisp and classic, evoking memories of old newspaper comic strips but with an updated sense of design. The coloring in particular is superb, really adding to the emotional nuances of the panels. And the title pages read as homages to Eisner's constant experimentation with design, introducing each story with a distinct visual style designed to tie into its theme.

It's the stories themselves that are a delight, however. Unlike the classic newspaper comics that it reminds me of, Cooke's Spirit moves through each storyline at a brisk, efficient clip, packing in little details of character and plot with great efficiency.

And the stories collected in this volume are self-contained within a single comic issue, which is remarkable in this age of decompressed storytelling. It would take Brian Michael Bendis at least three issues to tell most of the stories in this volume. Characters and subplots seem to carry over from one issue to the next, but you could simply drop in on any of these "chapters" with no prior knowledge of the Spirit and immediately pick up on the characters and plot. And be satisfied with the story arc and its conclusion. This is a completely different approach from that of Fables, which is also excellent, and it's one that is a real pleasure to encounter as a busy parent.

Cooke throws interesting characters out right and left. The pacing is fast and accentuates the sense of action conveyed by the art. Brief flashbacks deftly reveal key details about the main protagonists. There's humor mixed in with adventure. All in all, I give this collection an A+. I admit I was completely surprised by what it had to offer.

Review: Fables: War and Pieces

2009-11-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

Unlike the Good Prince, which was volume 10 of Fables, the eleventh collection of Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham's masterpiece, War and Pieces, pretty much demands that you've read the earlier volumes.

It's not that you can't understand what's taking place in this particular graphic novel without having read all that has come before, but you certainly won't appreciate it fully. The storyline has been building toward this huge conclusion for some 75 issues, so much so that Cory Doctorow mistakenly thought that this graphic novel concluded the Fables story.

In fact, there are at least two more collections on the way and I've read bits that suggest the story is perhaps only halfway completed. Willingham is not the sort of author to simply allow his characters a big victory without sifting through the consequences of their struggles.

In any case, in this volume the exiled Fables take the battle directly to the Adversary and his legions in the Homelands. I don't want to say more than that because I shouldn't spoil any surprises. And you can probably find a summary somewhere online if you really want.

I have to say that I've been reading Willingham's material for a while now. I have a nearly complete run of the troubled Elementals comic, which had some fits and starts. I've also got the script book for his Pantheon superhero comic, published in b/w by Lone Star comics. He's always had talent but I found a Elementals to be kind of scattershot in tone and conceptualization, ranging from really intriguing to weird and nearly incomprehensible. It also had a very, very strange collection of characters. Pantheon had some great concepts in it but was let down by poor execution in terms of the production and art. It also tried to cram a bit too much into twelve issues (or thirteen? I forget how many issues there ended up being, as I have the complete story in manuscript form), given all the implied backstory of the various characters and the comic universe that he was revealing. (I almost wish that Buckingham or some other talent like John Cassady could redraw the Pantheon story in color.)

For me, Fables is the real fulfillment of all the storytelling promise that Willingham displayed in those earlier comics. It's not something that I had any interest in reading based solely upon the high concept pitch. But the implementation is a treat. Willingham has found a vehicle whose dimensions are open enough to allow him to stretch even his more bizarre creative muscles, yet confined enough to stay coherent. With this series he really took a leap for me, moving from the ranks of promising journeymen to brilliant creator. And seeing that is as fun for me as reading the wonderful story itself.

Review: Fables: The Good Prince

2009-11-17T13:38:00.002-07:00

If you haven't been keeping up with the comic book Fables, written by Bill Willingham and illustrated by Mark Buckingham (pencils) and Steve Leialoha (inks), then you are missing out on one of the best comics being produced today. I'd rank this up there with titles like Ex Machina and Promethea (which has completed its run) for the richness of the setting, dialogue, artwork, and plot.

And it just so happens that this particular volume collects a story that you can enjoy and understand without being very familiar with what has come before. A lot of characters get introduced, but you are told most of what you need to know about them. I didn't read either of the two graphic novels in the series preceding this one and didn't have a problem keeping up.

The basic concept is that the Fables of western lore (and to a lesser degree Eastern--you do get to see them but the focus is mainly on the western fables living in America) were driven from the various faerie kingdoms by a mysterious Adversary and they ended up in New York living in disguise among the mundane population.

This particular storyline follows the adventures of a character who has played a pretty minor role up to this point in the series as far as I can tell, one Flycatcher (the Frog-Prince), who assumes his old role as Prince Ambrose and sets out on a noble quest with very interesting results. I can't say too much more without ruining some of the suspense, but suffice it to say that Willingham & Co. have developed a knack of making even conflicts that have foregone conclusions interesting to read, due to a combination of excellent visuals, some witty dialogue, and an ability to pull back now and then from the big picture view and zoom in on the specific casualties of any given struggle.

It's remarkable to me that Willingham can keep such a vast cast of characters straight and distinctive enough from each other to follow their exploits. He sketches out characters nicely with bits of dialogue, summing up small characters quickly while stretching out explorations of main characters at length. And one of the pleasures of Fables is that you never know when a seemingly minor character is going to be further developed in their own story. The Good Prince is a perfect example of that.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't credit Buckingham's excellent graphic design for helping distinguish the multitude of characters that dance across the page.

I'd only collected the first couple volumes of this series, as I have gotten out of the habit of collecting graphic novels in the past couple years, but I'm seriously reconsidering.

Blogging Milestone

2009-11-16T13:58:00.003-07:00

So, I was glancing at the sidebar and realized that I hit 172 posts (now 173). Which means that in 2009 I have officially surpassed my blogging totals from the previous two years [17 posts] by a factor of ten.

I leave it to the blogosphere and the Internet in general to determine is that is a Good Thing or not.

Review: Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

2009-11-16T13:34:00.003-07:00

This new young adult steampunk novel by Scott Westerfeld imagines an alternate World War I that pits British Darwinists--who have mastered the science of extracting and blending "life threads" to genetically engineer organisms--against German Clankers--who have engineered mechanical walking machines in all shapes and sizes.

It's a clever background. The Germans and their Austro-Hungarian allies have basically assembled a collection of steam-operated mecha, ranging in size from small one-man scouts to large, multi-legged land cruisers equipped with naval cannon. The Brits and their allies have aquatic and aerial navies assisted by their biotech. The wet navy has ships accompanied by giant Kraken-like "companions", while the latest airships used by the flyers are big floating ecosystems based on the greatly enlarged framework of whales.

These various creatures and creations are nicely illustrated in black and white pieces by artist Keith Thompson, scattered throughout the book.

The story starts out telling the parallel stories of two teens from very different sides of the tracks. Aleksander is the son of Archduke Ferdinand, on the run from would-be assassins following the political murder of his mother and father. Accompanied by some loyal house retainers, he helps pilot a walking talk (the Cyklop Stormwalker) to a hideout in the Alps. Deryn Sharp is a young girl determined to make her dream of becoming a member of the Royal Air Corps a reality (in memory of her late airman father), despite the fact that the military has a strict no girls policy. So she disguises herself as a boy with her older brother's help and assumes the role of midshipman Dylan Sharp.

The book alternates chapters in each character's story, until the narratives intersect about halfway through as strange events throw the unlikely pair together on an isolated glacier. Each teen has to adapt to new circumstances and plays a key role in helping their respective sides through a tough scrape. At this stage of their stories, at least, there is a friendship but only the barest hint of romance.

The book clearly demands a sequel, as we're left halfway through the story, though not really on a cliffhanger. And the afterword makes it clear that a sequel is in the works.

As Westerfeld says in his Afterword, "Leviathan is as much about possible futures as alternate pasts. It looks ahead to when machines will look like living creatures, and living creatures can be fabricated like machines." The book interlaces this futuristic element with bits of social issues, such as aristocracy and the role of women in society, that are rooted in its turn-of-the-century millieu. As such, it's a good example of steampunk.

I'm not normally a big reader of YA titles, and this book didn't amaze me or anything, but it's full of clever ideas and likable characters and I think it would be a very good read for a kid interested in exploring the genre.

Review: BPRD The Warning

2009-11-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

Most of the BPRD graphic novels to date have worked relatively well as stand-alone stories, with certain character revelations being introduced but the plots being decipherable (well, as much as they ever are) without a lot of familiarity with the earlier collections. Not so with this 10th collection in the series, which announces itself as the first book in the Scorched Earth trilogy.

The Warning tries to bring people up to speed, but I think it would be pretty confusing for those who haven't read several of the earlier graphic novels, such as Plague of Frogs or Garden of Souls. You've got legions of evil frog-beasts, strange devolved hominids building vast machines in the bowels of the Earth, visions of Cthuluesque monstrosities taking over the world, mysterious sorcerers appearing and disappearing in astral form, portents of a big destiny for Liz Sherman that belies her seemingly humble origins, and cryptic messages from the spirit of Lobster Johnston.

The city of Munich gets largely obliterated, the BPRD troops get some more serious gear, Liz gets kidnapped again by occult entities, and Abe Sapien starts acting exactly like Hellboy. Seriously, I don't know if the authors realize this, but in this storyline the personality transformation that began in Garden of Souls seems to be pretty much complete. Abe is talking and acting just as gung-ho, aggressive, and careless as Hellboy here. Still fun to read, but it just made me miss Hellboy actually taking part in these stories. I liked Abe more when they had more differences.

Overall, another good graphic novel, setting up a story arc that looks to deal out tremendous mayhem to Earth as ancient powers seek to reclaim their power and transform the planet into their playground. I'd be surprised if Hellboy himself doesn't make an appearance of sorts at some point in the process.

Review: Turn Coat by Jim Butcher

2009-11-14T14:47:00.005-07:00

This is the lastest novel in the Dresden Files series featuring the wizard private eye Harry Dresden. More so than some of the other books in this series, this one is aimed at people who have been keeping up with the series, thought you could still enjoy it if you aren't as familiar with all the characters here and their relationships.

It starts out with a bang and keeps the momentum going. As I've said before, Butcher does a good job of keeping the tension building in these books. The Warden Morgan, who has been a long-time thorn in Dresden's side, shows up on Dresden's doorstep asking for shelter and help in clearing his name. Morgan has been accused of murdering a senior member of the White Council, the big collective of wizards that set and enforce the rules about magical behavior that mortals must follow.

In keeping with his character but struggling against his personal feelings toward Morgan, Dresden agrees to help out. And because lately Butcher feels compelled to throw everything and the kitchen sink from his setting into each story, the novel brings in the White Court of the vampires in addition to involving the White Council. And Butcher shows that his monster-building chops are still sharp by bringing a really scary skinwalker into the story. This isn't a Navajo witch-style skinwalker so much as it is one of the ancestral, supernatural beings that inspired such creatures.

The novel brings about some significant changes for Dresden's relationship with Warden Morgan and Warden Anastasia Luccio, as well as a potentially big transformation for Dresden's vampire half-brother Thomas. Dresden also establishes a sort of psychic bond with an unexpected entity, perhaps filling the void left behind by the fragment of a fallen angel with whom he shared his consciousness for a couple books.

Dresden's police detective buddy Karin Murphy isn't in the book much. We get some more insight into the different senior members of the White Council and more hints, though pretty vague ones, about the supposed Black Council conspiracy that Dresden has been trying to convince people about for the past few books. At least he gets some people to agree with him this time around.

I admit that at times Butcher's tendency to bring all the various factions together in a single place for major battle royales gets a little familiar. It's as though he's a action-film director whose movie budgets keep increasing, letting him stage bigger and bigger blockbuster finales. There is a good shapechanging duel in this clash, however.

Another book that I felt compelled to finish in a few days. Not a good place for those new to the series to jump in, but a good mix of action and character development. If it is formulaic in places, it is a reliable formula.

Review: BPRD The Garden of Souls

2009-11-14T14:16:00.004-07:00

This graphic novel, written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, and illustrated by Guy Davis, continues the story of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense that began in Mignola's Hellboy comics. Hellboy hasn't appeared in the BPRD comics for a while now. Instead we get Hellboy's former compatriots, the amphibious humanoid Abe Sapien, the pyrokinetic Liz Sherman, and bodiless medium Johann Krauss.

By this point in the BPRD series (Garden of Souls is the 7th graphic novel), Captain Benjamin Daimo (a horribly scarred marine who returned from the dead in a mysterious fashion) and occult specialist Kate Corrigan are also on the team. For those keeping score, the homunculus Roger is dead at this point.

Anyway, this story involves Abe Sapien following mysterious messages about his past life as the occult dilettante Langdon Everett Caul. He brings Daimo with him to Indonesia, where he ultimately ends up at a strange little outpost of Victorian mad scientists who walk around inside these extremely cool looking robot suits (they look something like the helmet of an old diving suit, complete with portals, to which mechanical arms and legs in odd proportions are attached).

These fellows, who belong to something called the Oannes Society, are holding hostage a psychic Egyptian mummy named Panya who was apparently resurrected in the 1800s and has been walking the Earth since then. Of course the Oannes Society also has a crackpot scheme that involves triggering massive tsunamis that will kill many of the people in Southeast Asia, whose souls will then be absorbed by these artificial bodies the mad scientists have constructed for themselves, so that they will become godlike as a result.

I won't spoil the story in terms of how the bad guys get defeated or what Abe learns about his past. It's all rather confusing.

The things I liked:

The robotic suits worn by the Victorians are really, really cool looking. Guy Davis does an amazing job of drawing in Mignola's style.
The backstory of Panya the mummy is actually really interesting, at least the flashbacks to her life in the 1800s after she is brought back and becomes something of a celebrity in certain circles, only to be sequestered and then forgotten.
There is some nicely creepy stuff involving a message being sent via a young girl.

The things that were less satisfying:

I could not for the life of me figure out why a pseudo-scientific cult of Victorians whose interests seem to revolve around ancient sea gods would want to keep prisoner a mummy from a desert country who has no apparent link to the sea. At all.
Supposedly this reveals how and why Abe got transformed from Caul into his fishy form. And it does. Sort of. But not in a very satisfying way. And there's a very clear disconnect between the personality of Caul and that of Abe and no real explanation as to why he's so different now.
After a while all the weird occult societies and their various plots start to blur together.

Still, it's an entertaining story with some nice visual designs and solid storytelling.

Review: Midwinter by Matthew Sturges

2009-11-09T17:38:00.004-07:00

Picked this book up on a whim on the new books shelf at one of my local libraries.

It's the first novel by Sturges. He's a comic book writer whom I hadn't heard of, though apparently he's written some stuff in the Fables line that I actually might have read but not realized Bill Willingham had a partner on. And reading the acknowledgments, it looks like Chris Roberson, whom I saw at Armadillocon this year, was one of his readers and helpers with the novel.

Anyway, Midwinter is a fantasy novel set in a Faerie Realm. A former member of Queen Titania's Royal Guard gets released from prison to carry out a secret mission, so secret that he doesn't know exactly why he is doing it. He assembles some other prisoners to help him out.

It was a good if unspectacular book. Part of the problem was that I thought a couple of the main characters were pretty flat--there's a human in the party who does next to nothing and has no significant skills, which really stands out given all the magical abilities of the others. Sturges does about as much as he can with the lead protagonist, Mauritaine, who is one of those "incredibly competent and completely bound by his code of honor" types of characters. To be honest, I would have liked the book a little better if he hadn't been the main guy.

There are some good villains and some nice twists. I like the image of Unseelie Queen Mab's floating city. And I think Sturges does a good job for the most part of presenting the Faerie Lands and their history in a very economical fashion. The plot moves ahead without too many hiccups and the story sets itself up for sequels while still bringing the main plotline that it introduces to a satisfying conclusion.

So I'd recommend this, not as something that will amaze you, but as a good first effort by a writer who can craft a solid story and clearly has a vision for an intriguing world. The Dresden Files stories, though they have a very different feel, began in a similar fashion and just got better. I suspect Sturges has that same potential.

The Halloween Grinch

2009-10-31T18:31:00.003-06:00

I have a confession to make. Halloween is probably my least favorite of the major holidays each year.

On Valentine's Day I like to get chocolates and flowers for my wife.

The Fourth of July is loud but shooting off a few small fireworks around the house is fine and as long as we don't have to go to one of the big fireworks displays where there are huge crowds (with the interminable parking jams that result), I'm happy.

Thanksgiving is great if you have family around and feels cosy and comfortable even if you don't. Plus I'm usually pretty tired once the cooking and cleaning is done, so there isn't much stress.

Christmas is cool enough to compensate for the heightened stress that it brings.

But Halloween doesn't have a lot of redeeming factors for me.

I'm not really into dressing up in costumes that much. So I don't put much advance thought or effort or money into them.
I don't really like horror movies. My wife and I watch a scary movie every Halloween as a tradition, but I'm mostly hoping not to be bored or grossed out.
Having dozens of strangers ring my doorbell and ask me for candy stresses me out. I feel an obligation to have enough candy on hand. (The fact that we have a dog that goes ballistic when anybody comes near the door and so has to be kept shut away and whining in a separate room doesn't help). I do like to give out the candy itself, but the irregular timing of the visits just makes me tense for some reason.
By the same token, I expect someone to go to a modicum of effort to get free candy from me. The kids who don't say trick or treat, or who are really old, are a little annoying. The ones who keep coming up to the door after all the candy is gone, the lights are out, and it is quite late, really annoy me.
I'm also not big into this growing trend of people driving their kids into other people's neighborhoods and trolling for candy. When I was a kid, we went to a school party and walked around our neighborhood. People didn't drive us up to a street and pick us up at the end to drive off and deposit us elsewhere for more candy acquisitions.

Maybe I would feel different if I had a chance to go to a grown up Halloween party again, but that hasn't been the case for a decade or so. And so many adults seem to be so much more into Halloween now than they were when I was a kid.

I don't remember my parents making a whole lot of showy stuff for effect or dressing up in complicated costumes themselves at Halloween. I do remember my mom making simply awesome costumes for my sister that routinely won prizes at the school parties.

So I'm sitting here as the first groups of trick or treaters arrive, waiting by the front door as my kids are trick-or-treating with their mom. I could have gone too, but for some reason I feel weird to be asking other people for candy when there is no one at our house to hand out candy.

Like I said, I have a weird thing about Halloween. Still, the kids like it, so I try not to be a drag.

Review: Eifelheim

2009-10-17T11:52:00.003-06:00

This novel by Michael Flynn was nominated for a 2007 Hugo. It tells the story of first contact with aliens who crash their vessel in the Black forest in 1348.

There's another, shorter storyline interspersed with the medieval tale: this deals with a theoretical physicist and a historian whose work leads them to some interesting discoveries about the events that took place in the distant past.

The book moves along at a relatively sedate pace, with a lot of intellectual and ethical discussion and debate. The medieval sections are interesting, if not gripping. I think Flynn has done a good job here of portraying the very different world view of the villagers, nobles, and priests in this distant time and place.

Unfortunately that can make for some very dense and confusing reading, in particular when the main character, a well-educated priest named Dietrich who has a dark secret about his past, gets into discussions with the aliens about certain principles of physics and natural philosophy. I confess to reading a few of these sections several times without ever having a full grasp of the points being made, and I minored in the History of Science and Technology. However, I recognized or followed enough of the arguments to be impressed with Flynn's scholarship. He chose to try to describe these topics in a way that the characters of that period would have been most likely to approach them, rather than aiming for a more anachronistic approach that might have been easier to follow. Like I said, it can be rough going, but Flynn's careful and often clever use of language is impressive when dealing with such esoteric subjects.

Flynn has also created a number of very interesting, nicely developed medieval characters and does a similar job for a couple of the aliens. Their interactions seem believable and he generates enough empathy for certain characters that I felt sad at some of the fates that befell them.

The modern chapters of the book, which alternate between the points of view of Sharon (the physicist) and Tom (the historian), are rather awful in my view. The problems are manifold:

Sharon and Tom are annoying, largely oblivious characters whom I cared nothing about. Sharon is just incomprehensible most of the time and utterly unlikeable the rest of the time. Tom is a doofus. Not a lovable doofus, just a doofus. Plus, he alienated me as a historian (see below).
It is very hard to follow the gist of anything that they are talking or arguing about when it comes to their fields of inquiry or even their personal relationship. They are said to have been together a long time, but I have no inkling why, because in addition to not understanding each other, they don't seem to like or respect each other much.
I went to graduate school in history. I have family and friends teaching in history departments around the country. I have never met a historian like Tom, who is completely illiterate in "narrative" history, obsessed with statistics and models above all else, and who manages to constantly drop foreign phrases into the middle of his speech. I heard of one such person, but even meeting him I found he could hold a conversation about historical events without sounding like a mathematician. So Tom failed the credibility test for me.
Add it all up, and the Now chapters add practically nothing to the book until the very end. They don't really move the plot, they don't make you care more about the characters, they don't provide any action, and they aren't very interesting.

Needless to say, I was stunned to learn in the afterword that the current novel was developed out of an 1985 Novella from which the "Now" chapters of the novel were taken. I can't imagine reading through that novella from start to finish or how it could have planted a seed that could have blossomed into the far superior historical chapters of the novel.

Overall I think the novel is worth a read if you have a little time and are ready to stretch your mind a bit. It isn't long, but it was very slow going in places for me. I honestly think you can skim the "now" chapters (thankfully they are short and there are only 10 in all), except for the final one, Anton. You will miss very little that couldn't be summed up thusly:

There's a village that disappeared during the Black Death and was never rebuilt, though historical models suggest that it should have been.
There's an annoying physicist with an theory that eventually and painfully morphs into a confusing explanation for faster than light travel through unusual means.
The researchers eventually figure out that the missing town is where the aliens landed and that it was never resettled because of the events that occurred there in the past. There is an obscure record of some of the alien technology hidden in some of the manuscripts from the period that ties into the annoying physicist's research and provides a clue that the legends about the abandoned town may have been true.

There, that's all that is really conveyed by the nine chapters in terms of the plot. Go straight to the final one and you'll do fine without distracting yourself with ideas like, "I hope Sharon gets fired," or "Maybe Tom will get a clue."

Declining States of Happiness

2009-10-15T13:59:00.003-06:00

Read this post on the Freakonomics blog and had to comment upon it. The post refers to a paper noting the decline in the reported levels of happiness of American women over the past few decades. Apparently this paper was recently attacked in an op-ed piece by a journalist who questioned its methodology. Here one of the researchers defends his work.

The study itself may be perfectly reasonable--I have not read it. The comments about it annoyed me, as did the complete dismissal of the criticisms leveled by the journalist, some of which seemed to be petty but others of which seemed to be practical enough.

I don't know if my comment will pass blog muster or not. Here's what I wrote:

In regards to #33, the original poster is saying several things about the flawed nature of self-reported happiness surveys as sources of hard empirical data. The political screed you seem to have provided on your own.

(a) People (and societies) don’t all define happiness in the same way. Individual and social expectations play a huge role in determining happiness. Over time, it seems reasonable to argue that these expectations can change within a society. (After all, the survey is arguing that levels of happiness can change–why not definitions of happiness as well?)

(b) When revealing personal information on anonymous surveys, people may be motivated to misrepresent themselves. If they feel they SHOULD be answering in a particular fashion, they have a higher incentive not to give an honest answer that paints them in a negative light.

(c) Surveys asking people to self-report their degree of happiness have the same challenges as any survey asking about someone’s emotional state, as opposed to something more concrete like their height or salary. Even if everyone defined happiness in the same way and answered honestly, what happens if you catch a survey respondent on a bad or good day?

These issues make me very suspicious that a statistical analysis of such self-reported happiness data can provide results that in and of themselves explain much of anything about the phenomena they observe. For example, what if contemporary women continue the pattern of OVER-reporting happiness as has been proposed for the earlier generation of respondents? The gap would actually be even greater than proposed.

What such a study can do is raise important questions. Have womens’ EXPECTATIONS for their personal lives and their social roles changed in the past few decades, and how? Or are the EXPERIENCES of modern women contributing to a decline in happiness? Perhaps both? Do men and women in our society bring fundamentally different perspectives to the question of happiness, or do they define it in the same way? Those are difficult and interesting questions, but this study is just a stepping stone toward them. [end comment]

Now, a statistician may argue that they have mathemathical methods allowing them to account for any outlying deviations in credible responses to the happiness survey.

I say bullshit to that. The entire enterprise is flawed because it takes one incredibly vague, unconfirmed data point (How happy are you?) and extrapolates from there.

Don't believe me? Imagine asking a bunch of people how nice they are and then trying to make grand assumptions about the shift in compassion in American society. Would that hold as much credibility as asking people their views of capital punishment or examining hard data on how much they contributed to charities?

Cooking: Homemade Tomato sauce and pasta

2009-10-09T10:29:00.003-06:00

So, I learned a few things yesterday about cooking.

You really need to look closely when someone leaves a note that says "1/2 the recipe" and adjust the ingredients accordingly.
Home grown tomatoes and herbs just taste so much better than store-bought stuff. I will really miss these in a week or two.
I'm close to being sick of eating stuff with tomatoes. So maybe it balances out.
A garlic clove is a deceptively vague unit of measure, because cloves vary wildly in size. The recipe I made was apparently intended to repel vampires. I halved the amount of garlic and it was still a bit heavy for my taste.
When you toast pine nuts, recognize that they cook incredibly quickly, even on low heat. You can't turn away for, say, 30 seconds to check something at the sink. Or you'll burn a few of them.
Don't skimp on the quality of the olive oil--good olive oil is SO much better than cheap olive oil. I haven't noticed this with stuff like canola oil or corn oil. I used good olive oil and it showed.
If you reserve half a cup or so of the water that you cooked the pasta with, you can add it to a thinner sauce and thicken it (with the starch washed off the pasta) while adding complementary flavor. In theory. Because I drained the pasta before I forgot.

The result was still pretty good. I think I would have paid a bit more attention if the sauce had some meat in it, because I would have been more excited about the meal. Pasta is pretty simple in many ways, but there are little tricks I'm still learning. And sauces have a lot of room for mistakes to be made.

Wrist Brace: Pros and Cons

2009-10-08T11:35:00.005-06:00

[Spider-Man's web-shooters, courtesy of Wikipedia. I am wearing something kind of like these, only not cool. In any way. Unless you are an elementary school kid.]

I hurt my wrist and I'm wearing a wrist brace. I thought I'd tell you all about it.

The advantages of wearing a wrist brace:

Reduced wrist pain for the most part
Even when my wrist is still sore, wearing the brace draws attention to my ailment in a quiet but obvious way. People ask, "What did you do to your wrist?" with expressions of concern. This gives me a variety of response options: (a) the joke explanation ("I got high-fived so hard it popped a tendon"), which I almost always use for kids; (b) the shrug-the-shoulders, "Guess I'm getting old" line; (c) the "lots of typing and some weight-lifting" line (which not only has the virtue of being largely true, it draws attention to two of my more respectable hobbies); or (d) "Shooting baskets," which I reserve for people who know that up until last week, I generally spend about 15-20 minutes shooting baskets in the park next to my kids' elementary school each day before I pick them up. There are junior high kids who just call me, "The basketball guy."
I get to politely brush off expressions of concern with a brave and/or optimistic, "It will get better. Or not. Just one of those things in life." Just saying this often enough almost convinces me that it is true and helps alleviate my typical pessimism about physical setbacks.
Wearing the brace discourages me from typing too much or doing several other things that probably contributed to the problem in the first place.
Every once in a while, I look down and can't help feeling a little bit like Spider-Man.

Cons about wearing the wrist brace:

Tough to fit under the sleeves of some shirts.
Can't play basketball with the brace on. The other day, for the first time ever, I saw another adult shooting baskets in the park before the end of school. Older, white-haired fellow. Missing a lot of shots but his release put nice spin on the ball, so I could tell he knew what he was doing. Really wanted to go shoot with him for a minute, particularly since he had a ball that was clearly a bit low on air and I always drive around with a ball, pump, and needle in my car. But it was quite early in the "rest the wrist" process and I didn't want to screw up my self-guided rehabilitation.
Makes going to the bathroom a bit of an adventure, because . . . well, the brace/splint keeps you from bending your wrist. Now, imagine attending to a certain anterior region of your anatomy following a trip to the bathroom with an arm that moves like a robotic appendage or the limb of a George Romero style zombie. Ain't happening. So I have to remove the brace and then put it back on. (Note that this has really brought home to me how right-handed I am. The other day I thought, "Well, I'll try the left hand this time." And it simply refused to move, as if my right-brain was saying, "The right hand gets all the accolades and respect anyway--the left hand is not going to assume this duty." I seriously hope that I don't ever break my right arm.)
Sometimes people make professional bowler jokes regarding the wrist brace. Not a fan of bowling.
Every once I a while I try to flex my right hand and realize how impractical Spider-Man's classic wrist-mounted web-shooters (see above) with the trigger in the palm really are. That saddens me, because those are cool.

Squirrels and Us

2009-10-07T08:35:00.001-06:00

It's in the nature of a squirrel
To stutter-sprint across open ground
Leap and pause, double-back
Start and stop and start again
Quick as you blink

A hawk will snatch a squirrel
Who hews to a true trajectory

But on city streets
There's no hawk to fool
Just the onrushing oblivion
of tires on pavement.

Still, a squirrel has its nature
Memories burned into the blood and bone
of generations
And it gives up these habits hard

How often do we hesitate,
Reverse course or stop short
Because we imagine the shadow
of a hawk overhead
Flying out of our past
Thinking we are dodging phantom dangers
When we are only fooling
Ourselves

Field Trip

2009-10-06T19:55:00.002-06:00

My hand enfolds yours
As we stumble through the cold water
Bare feet shivering in rubber boots
Soles slipping on slick stones

We are not going to fall

We are here to catch mayflies and fish and crawdads
With nets and buckets

But we won't

Instead we'll find little blobs of jelly from snail eggs
Big stones encrusted with small clusters of sand
(these hide tiny larvae)
And slip on rocks covered with green slime
(this is alive too)

I will stand in clear shallow water and see nothing
A moment later, a child dips in a net and scoops up a fish

We won't catch big things, much as we try
But we will see
A crawdad growing back a lost claw
(I feel the splint on my wrist and can only laugh with envy)
Mayflies dancing on sunbeams before they die
(They have no mouths, so their ballet is their mating song)
Little things alive all around us
That I never notice
And that I'll probably forget again

But I won't forget the feel of your hand in mine
As we made it back across together

Review: Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon

2009-10-06T19:46:00.005-06:00

I read these 25 issues written by Joss Whedon and illustrated by John Cassaday in the form of graphic novels: one hardcover collecting the first 12 issues and two softcovers collecting issues 13-24 and Giant-Sized Astonishing X-Men 1.

Here are the things I liked about the series:

The core cast is stripped down to a manageable number.
The dialogue between characters is fantastic, especially the exchanges between Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost. Fans of either Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel will see a lot of similar quips and snarkiness here.
I think Whedon gets a good handle on characters like Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, and Beast. And he manages to make Wolverine interesting without having him steal every scene, which is nice.
There is some much appreciated humor sprinkled in throughout that manages not to derail the action in the slightest.
I love Cassaday's art in general, particularly how he shows emotion through body language blended with facial expressions and his ability to draw just about any crazy thing that Whedon can dream up side-by-side with perfectly normal looking stuff like teens, clothes, and a grassy lawn. It is immersive.
Seriously, tons of great one-liners, most of which I just can't set up properly here because they have a visual element or require a few set-up lines to produce the proper payoff. And it might sound silly, but whoever placed the word balloons in the panels did a great job. You can see the timing that you would normally hear if actors were delivering these lines from a script.
For the most part, the new characters that Whedon introduces, such as the young student who can create a cool-looking force field around herself, the villain Ord of the Breakworld, the artificial intelligence Danger, or the really bitchy Agent Brand of the interstellar/interdimensional variation of SHIELD known as SWORD (get it?), are well done. Whedon has this particular knack for making his key antagonists so interesting that you want to see them keep coming back even when they are doing bad things.
The interpersonal drama is great and the personality issues/relationship subplots are woven deftly into the action scenes.
There is a real sense of loss in the storyline.

The things I didn't like:

I wasn't that excited about the old costumes coming back, particularly Wolverine's bumblebee look. The rationale given in the book is rather weak (superheroes wear costumes).
Ord is a cool character given some of his lines and his trials and tribulations. But he looks downright goofy. The Breakworlders in general resemble a bunch of homicidal Dr. Seuss characters.
The plausibility of some major plot elements make as much sense as the various prophecies tossed out in Angel or the cosmology of the 'Verse in Firefly (one solar system with a ton of terraformed habitable moons that all have Earthlike gravity and atmosphere and the one at the edge of the solar system still gets regular, normal sunshine--what?). Basically, as with most of Whedon's work in my opinion, you shouldn't look too closely at why these Big Events/Threats happen, or what the rules of the setting are, because they don't make a whole hell of a lot of sense (the vampires in Buffy and Angel are wildly inconsistent and the whole "a demon takes over the dead human body because some other half-demon bit them" is flaky and tosses out a lot of what makes vampires potentially interesting). What's important is how Whedon's characters react to these events and rules, which does tend to make sense and can be very engrossing.
The Breakworld, an entirely new setting element, is really just a stand-in for yet another Demon Dimension where most everything and everyone is violent and dangerous. It felt a bit forced into the Marvel Universe.

Neutral:

Those familiar with the casts of Angel and Buffy will probably find a fair number of similar characterizations in play here. Emma Frost and Brand as dueling bitches who somehow win our sympathy (Cordelia). Kitty Pryde as a kind of Willow/Fred amalgam. Cyclops has a bit of the forlorn hero vibe that Angel carried, Beast goes back and forth between cerebral and action hero in the vein of Wesley. Wolverine is a bit like a less talkative Spike. The thing is, all of these characterizations work, in my view. And it's probably more that certain relationships or bits of dialogue are reminiscient of some scenes in those series than anything else. So perhaps this is in the eye of the beholder.

Versus Grant Morrison's New X-Men or Marc Millar's Ultimate X-Men

There aren't as many wild and daring ideas in this story as there were in either the Ultimate X-Men by Marc Millar or the New X-Men by Grant Morrison. There's one very interesting social concept in Astonishing X-Men, the idea of a cure for mutants, that got more or less blatantly stolen for the X-Men 3 movie. But it just falls by the wayside without any real sense of resolution after it gets tossed out there.
On the other hand, the narrative of Whedon's story is much more coherent than Morrison's sequence. I also found the characters that Whedon introduced far more interesting and clearly presented than the majority of the ones that Morrison introduced, who are for the most part head-scratchers (still not sure what Xorn or Fantomex's abilities were or how they made any sense, and I could have done completely without Beak or Angel). Morrison tends to introduce new characters explicitly to upstage existing iconic characters, like a gamer who wants his new player character to prove he can beat up the existing high-level NPCs in a campaign. Thus they swiftly become annoying rather than integrating into an existing concept. And Whedon writes dialogue about a dozen times better than Morrison.
As far as Millar goes, in Ultimate X-Men, as in most of his comics work (though to a lesser degree in Ultimates), he dials most everyone up a bit too far on the being a bastard or a self-interested ass personality meter for any of them to be likeable or even sympathetic. I couldn't care less about any of Millar's X-Men living or dying. I was genuinely upset when Whedon killed somebody major off at the end of his story arc.
So if I had to look at relative strengths of the three series, I'd say Morrison is most gifted at exploring and introducing wild and original ideas in a setting, Millar is best at crafting a fairly coherent plot that drives forward very focused characters with great action and intensity, and Whedon is a master of creating characters that feel real and generate a range of strong emotional responses (humor, affection, dislike) in readers. Your reading preferences will probably influence your responses accordingly.

I definitely recommend the series, which is quite self-contained vis-a-vis the rest of the Marvel Universe. It doesn't even connect that strongly to the events of Grant Morrison's lengthy run on New X-Men that preceded it in the continuity.

Cooking: Roast Chicken

2009-10-06T09:29:00.003-06:00

Made another one of my favorite meals last night: Roast Chicken with potatoes and carrots. This version produces a beautifully browned chicken with crispy skin while also providing very juicy breast meat and nicely flavored potatoes and carrots.

The key to this recipe is rotating the chicken in the oven so that it cooks and browns evenly and then letting it rest to collect the juices. And also butter.

1. You heat the oven to 450 F. Get a 4-5 pound whole fryer with the giblets and such removed. (Heavier is better and I've found that organic chickens have a richer flavor.) Then you melt a tablespoon or two of butter and massage it into the skin of the chicken. You can use a brush if you're afraid to get your hands greasy.

2. Chop up half an onion into a few big chunks and cut some rosemary or sage (last night I used sage from our garden) and stuff both into the cavity of the chicken.

3. Put the chicken on its side in a roasting pan and put the pan in the oven for 30 minutes.

4. Slice some small red potatoes in half (bigger potatoes may need to be quartered--I don't like mine more than an inch in thickness) and chop some carrots (or use baby carrots).

5. After the first 30 minutes, take the pan out of the oven. Turn the chicken over onto the opposite side. Baste it (I use a brush) with pan juices and some more of the melted butter. Then add the potatoes and carrots and put back in the oven for another 30 minutes.

6. After the second 30 minutes is up, turn the chicken breast side up in the pan. Baste it again and stir up the potatoes and carrots. Set the timer for 10 minutes. At the end of that ten minutes, baste again and set timer for another 10 minutes. At the end of that 10 minutes, check to see how done the chicken is--wiggling the leg to see if it is nice and loose works pretty well. You may or may not need a final 10 minutes in the oven (A 4 pound chicken is usually done after two 10 minute sessions, while a 5 pounder often takes 3 10 minute sessions.)

7. Take the chicken out of the oven. Leave the potatoes and carrots in for another 20 minutes. During this final 20 minutes, you need to put the chicken breast side down on a cutting board and tent it with foil to help keep it warm. Angle the chicken so that the back end is higher than the front. This lets the juices in the chicken drip down and infuse the breast meat, which can often get a little dry during normal roasting because it takes a bit longer for the dark meat to cook than the white meat. (Warning: you want a cutting board or surface with grooves in it to catch the chicken fat and juices that drain down, otherwise you'll have a very messy counter.

8. After the last 20 minutes, take the potatoes and carrots out of the oven. Turn the chicken right side up and carve it. Serve with the carrots and potatoes.

For our family this meal always produces leftovers that are very tasty a couple days later.

I Imagine

2009-10-04T12:14:00.004-06:00

Imagination became a problem for me
When I started to believe that I had
to do something with it
Other than enjoy the places it took me.

The need to explain my imaginary places,
The need to share them,
The need for them to be understood
and appreciated.

I made these needs up at some point
I don't remember when.

People said when I was young,
"You'll be a Writer."
And I write every day
Without the capital.

But it feels like I'm failing
every time I imagine something beautiful and strange
And I can't find a way to express
the wonder of it
the mystery of it
the magic of it
To anyone else.

I'm mocked by my daydreams
Butterflies I cannot catch
without stilling them.

When you chase something, looking back you remember the pursuit
and not the thing itself.
I miss what I experienced when I didn't worry about how to share my personal vistas
with all of you.

Not that you did anything wrong.

I told myself
That I was an insufficient audience.

I told myself to feel lonely
If I couldn't bring the rest of you along.

Giants

2009-10-04T12:06:00.005-06:00

Yesterday I saw the world's largest Ponderosa pine
And read an article about the world's tallest man.

Today I learned
They aren't the biggest any more
If they ever were.

(Or maybe they are
I took someone else's word for it.)

I doubt the tree was as lonely as the man.
Trees are used to being big
Every forest has its giants.

And giant trees are old trees, and probably wise.

Giant men die young.

Their hearts are not big enough
To carry the weight of the words and the stares that fall upon them.

Come to think of it,
I suspect that people cut down most giant trees as well.

And some giant men, like trees, are mounted on display,
Sliced open to show the years of their lives
for people to point to and nod, as if they understood.

A lucky giant man is buried young
And in the earth, dreams of becoming a great old tree.

Rio Gets Olympics?

2009-10-02T23:29:00.002-06:00

When I first read this, I thought, "Wow, isn't Rio one of the deadliest cities in the world, with an absurdly high murder rate?"

Well, this article suggests that currently, in terms of murders per 100,000 people, Rio ranks below Detroit (and also New Orleans if you read the fine print, which notes that the murder statistics are based on the pre-Katrina population--but since New Orleans now has a lower population and still has a lot of murders, it's rate should be higher).

Now, having fewer murders per capita than Detroit may not be saying much, but it does suggest that Rio isn't as outlandish as it might appear at first blush.

Also humorous that good 'ol power broker Juan Antonio Samaranch made a personal and very obvious appeal to push Madrid into the final round of voting. Madrid Train Bombings, anyone?

The Olympic Committee, totally above board and honest in its deliberations. (Not that Chicago has a lot of room to complain about dirty politics.)

Cooking: Tomato Bisque

2009-10-02T17:02:00.006-06:00

[This is a photo of someone else's tomato bisque, as I didn't feel like taking a photo of my own.]

Work has been wearing my wife down a bit lately, so since I'm the stay-at-home person, I recently offered to handle more of the cooking (something she normally enjoys) so that she only has to cook on the weekend. Last night I baked some salmon with lemon and thyme, baked some potatoes, and made buttermilk dressing (with my daughter's assistance) for a salad with some cherry tomatoes from our garden.

So today I made a tomato bisque from scratch, using fresh tomatoes and herbs (basil, thyme, oregano, and parsley) from our own garden (along with some stuff like mushrooms, cream, and provolone cheese from the store). This is a recipe that Lisa has had for a long time, but I think this is the first time I've made it by myself. And we've never cooked it with primarily home-grown ingredients before.

It took a little more than two hours of cooking, a bit more than an hour of that involving hands on work in the kitchen: a lot of chopping, dicing, sauteeing, and crushing (the tomatoes). Then some blending to puree the results.

The result had really good flavor but was a little bit thinner than it is normally. Everyone seemed to like it. So some success.

No Respect for Science Fiction(?)

2009-10-02T10:59:00.005-06:00

[These images are painted figures from the gallery at Hydra Miniatures, a site that sells really awesome pulp sci-fi figures. I doubt they care at all about the Booker Prize so I hope they don't mind my using the image here. Check them out.]

There was an interesting article in the Guardian discussing science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson's assertion that the United Kingdom's Booker Prize for literature routinely and unjustly snubs science fiction as a genre. One of the judges, English professor John Mullan, argues that science fiction has become an enclosed world cut off from the rest of fiction and mainstream society. "When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres . . ." he says, but this is no longer the case.

There is a whole lot of stuff to unpack here. First, Mullan's comment seems wrongheaded to me because it gets things precisely backwards. Growing up, I found science fiction to be much less accepted as a genre than other forms. I was never able to convince an English teacher to allow me to write a book report or a literary critique of a work of science fiction, for example. Moreover, the literary quality of the writing in science fiction, particularly in the terms of the depth of characterization and the richness of the language itself, has improved significantly in the past few decades. There have always been standouts in this regard, but there are many writers these days who can craft a tale involving fantastic settings and social/technological speculation while also presenting characters that go beyond the classic archetypes and stereotypes of the genre.

I also think that there are more mainstream writers crossing over into science fiction-influenced stories and vice versa. Authors like Greg Bear and Orson Scott Card have written what are essentially contemporary thrillers in recent years, while a mystery writer like Walter Mosley has tried his hand at science fiction. Maria Doria Russell wrote a powerful science fiction novel, The Sparrow, and a sequel Children of God, but shifted to historical fiction in later work.

Just because publishers label certain novels in particular ways and bookstores stock them in specific sections should not preclude anyone with the capability of walking a dozen paces or so from checking out what is going on in different fields. The branch of the public library closest to us has all the fiction books mixed together on the shelves by author. I find this quite refreshing, to tell you the truth.

Second, I do think it has become harder to write what is generally accepted as cutting edge or hard science fiction, because the scientific and technological issues involved have become more complex and more likely, if extrapolated to their logical extremes, to transform the main characters into something unrecognizable as human. Someone might craft an excellent book in this regard that utterly fails to grab a reader because they cannot relate to the inhuman or posthuman protagonist(s). Now, this sort of thing might be what Mullan is referring to, but I hardly think it is any more common than were the older sci-fi books that failed to grab mainstream readers because they could not relate to the subhuman protagonist(s), those cardboard valiant engineers and monocultural aliens who fell flat.

Third, the themes of science fiction are demonstrably more relevant today, because we live in a world where the pace of technological change, the clash of cultures, and the impact of modern society on the environment are major news headlines. Positing future scenarios about such circumstances as a kind of thought experiment is precisely the sort of thing at which good science fiction excels. In this sense it is more equipped to inform readers about our modern condition and where it might lead than many other genres, while remaining equally capable of entertainment.

Finally, I found a bit of irony in the fact that I've never found Kim Stanley Robinson's own writing very compelling in spite of his accolades. I've tried twice to read The Years of Rice and Salt to no avail, because it is hard to get a feel for the characters and I have to be in the mood to have to work to understand what he's talking about because he explains things so poorly or vaguely. Never was interested in the Mars trilogy that he's famous for, though I might give it another try in the future. Still, though he isn't my personal cup of tea and I would therefore probably take his own literary award suggestions (as noted in the article) with a grain of salt (or rice), Mr. Robinson seems to be making a valid point here.

It's startling that comic books have probably gained more critical appreciation, and certainly more popular appreciation, in the past decade or so than science fiction has. I wonder if that's because comics translate so easily to the big screen or the television, while most movies or television shows dubbed science fiction are very, very simplistic compared to the current literature in the field.