Steve will be along with his post soon, but in the meantime, may this day be filled with joy and blessings for you and your loved ones. Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light has a Christmas post you might enjoy.

Christmas is a special day for me. It’s one of many cyclical events that forcefully reminds me that I have a constricted spiritual life.

I don’t have any sacred histories or traditions to fall back upon. No rituals, no organized, legitimizing group to reinforce any spiritual beliefs that I might cobble together.

I instinctively revulse from almost all religious systems, viewing them as comforting or terrifying tales about imaginary friends and events. They’re the things that weaker people need to help them cope when they’re forced to deal with the fact that the universe is vast, uncaring, and devoid of any underlying meaning.

Religions tell you what is good and bad behavior and thought, because you’re too stupid to figure those things out for yourself. The religions that build temples and churches and have a defined hierarchy and dogma are mostly there for the benefit of those who make the dogma and solicit the money to build the churches. They’re, ultimately, authoritarian control structures.

I’m an empiricist, a reductionist, someone who damn well demands evidence that can be independently confirmed before I’ll climb on board your train to glory.

It’s lonely and it’s cold.

And yet….

Read More »

Okay, I never ask people to follow links without some info to tell them what’s on the other side.

But you must, must, MUST follow this link and read all of the correspondence that follows, including the second page. This is, as far as I can tell, a true story, and is easily the funniest thing I’ve read this year.

Todd and Lyger’s Excellent Hacking Adventure

When you’re done with it, go to this:

NetWork World Article

For all I know, this thing’s all over the net, since I’ve been out of pocket traveling this weekend, so forgive me if you’ve seen it already, but today is the first time I’ve seen it. Props to 3*s at KVR for posting on it.

This is not my Sunday post incidentally. Was taking a break from doing that and happened across this.

I got my George Jetson car. Okay, technically it’s The Dude’s car, but I get to drive it occasionally. It doesn’t fly, but it comes very close in all other respects.

It doesn’t have a regular key and ignition. You get in using the proximity remote. Once inside, you push the power button. The front heads-up display appears as does the touch pad climate, audio, and trip display.

It’s ready to drive, but I’m sitting in silence. That is until the Lucy station on XM radio kicks on with Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.” I toggle the Lucite encased CVT gear shift to “D.” There’s a small hiccup as I depress the gas pedal and glide off in almost complete silence.

The Dude is calling it The Pious. But it’s really The Prius – and it rocks.

I like to drive fast. Even my “Mom-mobile” is a turbo-charged Volvo station wagon. But in the Prius, I am The Zen Queen. “Pass me, you SUV douche bags, I care not. You are dinosaurs and I am a mammal. Your reign on Earth is coming to an end. Bwahahahahahah!” Okay, so I get a little personal while driving.

According to the sticker, it should get 60 MPG on the highway. I asked the salesman when we were test driving it what it really got, and he admitted to 50 MPG on the highway. I can live with that. At least for now.

I don’t think we’re saving the world by buying the Prius. I’m just hoping to make a change in some small way. And I figure – like Egg Shen says in the beginning of Big Trouble in Little China, “See, that was nothing. But that’s how it always begins. Very small.”

And ain’t that the truth?

Ursula K. Le Guin recently wrote an important essay on the place of fantasy in society. The essay is superb throughout, and you should definitely read the whole thing, but one of my favorite parts is this.

Though modernism is behind us and postmodernism may be joining it, still many critics and reviewers approach fantasy determined to keep Caliban permanently confined in the cage of Kiddie Lit. The voice of Edmund Wilson reviewing J R R Tolkien is still heard, bleating: “Oo, those awful Orcs!” There should be a word – “maturismo”, like “machismo”? – for the anxious savagery of the intellectual who thinks his adulthood has been impugned.

To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizeable error. Rational yet non-intellectual, moral yet inexplicit, symbolic not allegorical, fantasy is not primitive but primary. Many of its great texts are poetry, and its prose often approaches poetry in density of implication and imagery. The fantastic, the marvellous, the impossible rode the mainstream of literature from the epics and romances of the Middle Ages through Ariosto and Tasso and their imitators, to Rabelais and Spenser and beyond. This is not to say that everybody approved of it. Conflict with religion and with realism always loomed. In the first great European novel, imagination and realism meet head-on, and their contest is the very stuff and argument of the book. Don Quixote is driven mad by chivalric fantasies – but what is he without his madness?

I’ve long been fascinated by the aversion that some people have to forms of entertainment they deem insufficiently mature and realistic. Le Guin references other genres besides fantasy, including science fiction, though she argues that fantasy is the primary non-realist literature of choice in childhood, whereas SF and other non-literary/ non-realist/ genre fiction are adopted as readers enter adolescence. I think her point is valid, though it’s not just fantasy that triggers maturismo. I have encountered serious discomfort before, occasionally even alarm, when I tell some of my friends and acquaintances I write science fiction.
Read More »

This one’s for Caroline and Brad.

I love some of Steve Lynch’s songs and really hate others, but this one is great–especially the harmonica solo sin harmonica.

Another great song of his, “If I Could Be A Superhero.”

I grew up in Kansas, and the Holiday Season prompts both childhood memories and a sense of devotion to my native soil. So I’d like to write a few words in defense and praise of the Sunflower State.

It seems that most non-Kansans I meet have a negative attitude toward visiting the state of my birth. More often than not, they seem to view Kansas as a long, grueling stretch to suffer through while on the way to somewhere else. Upon investigation, though, I usually find that this attitude is based not upon actual experience, but upon two false assumptions.

The first of these assumptions is that all of Kansas is as flat and dull as a stale pancake. This is only true once you get west of Salina (and even then, there are worthwhile attractions such as The World’s Largest Prairie Dog). The eastern third of the state, however, boasts diverse and beautiful topography, including pastures, meadows, hills, trees, meadows, and pastures. Also, thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers and the many large holes they have dug, Kansas is also home to the best crappie fishing on the planet.

The second assumption is that if you drive through Kansas, you will be attacked by flying monkeys. This canard is the fault of both L. Frank Baum and, especially, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Read More »

(Photo courtesy Bob Yeager)

Amanda Marcote at Pandagon has some interesting things to say about recycling. It’s not that she thinks recycling is bad. In fact, she thinks its very good. But she wonders if recylcing isn’t a way of feeling better about driving your car to work–that people (me included) use it as a salve to our conscience. I am of two minds about recycling. I don’t think it makes a big huge difference, but I do think it teaches us mindfulness. It makes consideration of what we throw out part of our lives. And that, I think, could help lead to a reduction in waste–it’s a ritual in a kind of social religion that says things like global warming and destruction of habitat are bad. But I also wondered if it doesn’t make people feel as if we’ve done something meaningful when we really have barely scratched the surface.

When I was at Ohio University, David Gillis and I used to watch cartoons together. David was 6’6” tall and loved Chuck Jones cartoons. Particularly Roadrunner. He loved the landscapes—those looming deserts with their vertical cliffs, flat floors and precariously balanced rocks. There were no humans in this landscape, just roads and the occasional truck or car, and apparently, a pretty good postal system since the coyote could get almost anything out of the Acme catalogue by mail. It was a vertigo inducing paean to the open road full of space and blue skies.

David was also the person who observed that in Chuck Jones world, if it was cute, big-eyed and apparently defenseless, it would kick your ass. The roadrunner, those cute kittens that were always the target of the bigger more established cat. They never lifted a finger—or rather a toe or claw—to defend themselves, and yet their adversaries were always getting flattened, blown up by TNT, or flung halfway across the state by giant slingshots, or flattened against the grill of a truck driven by no person (who might have braked) but rather only by the soulless impetus of the automata itself. Trucks were Newtonian, in motion they tended to stay in motion. And on a Chuck Jones road, there is only motion.

Those big eyed creatures are mute (except for the famous ‘meep-meep’) but there are several episodes where the Coyote speaks. In one he even has a card. Wile E. Coyote, Supergenius. Those innocents, the Roadrunner and the kitten, they have no speech, no goals, no needs. They are like the lilies of the field, just existing to be what they are. In the case of the Roadrunner, it is moving. Speed. Constant motion for no reason other than its own sake. The Roadrunner doesn’t appear to be trying to get anywhere. Although he will stop for a pile of birdseed or a pretty She-Roadrunner. He has no home, or at least, it never dawns on the Coyote to stake it out.

Which leads me to understand that the Chuck Jones cartoon is actually about us, and about our ceaseless, existential striving. We are not and can never be the Roadrunner. Although we sympathize and root for the Roadrunner, we are, in fact, the Coyote. Scheming, working, sweating. Fallen. Often falling, our tiny shadow on the floor of the canyon getting bigger and bigger and we whistle down until we finally hit, leaving a little coyote shaped crater. While the Roadrunner, innocent, still in a state of grace, zooms past.

From inside the office this morning.

I had to trudge through the snow to get to the office. Uphill. Both ways. Kids today got it easy!

And I don’t think it’s cocaine.

And it’s very snug in there. Thank gnu for all the insulation I crammed in the walls.

But who can write when it’s snowing!

Assuming I can tiptoe past the bronchitis which seems intent upon ambushing my Christmas, I’m supposed to go give blood on Friday. Specifically, apheresis, a process whereby they take my blood, separate out the stuff they want — platelets and plasma, usually — then return the remnant to me. Will you think I’m weird when I tell you that I love doing this?
Read More »