The buzzards have left us.

Or perhaps they’ve been taken away, just as that big yellow taxi
took away Joni Mitchell’s old man.

Five weeks ago, workmen climbed the cell phone tower described in
my post of November 16 (“Childe Buzzard to the Dark Tower Came”)
to install additional gigantic cables and metallic doohickeys. And ever
since they did that, the hundreds of buzzards who used to roost
on the tower every night have refused to return.

I’ve looked for them every morning, almost in vain. I say
“almost” because on one morning several days ago, I spotted a
single lonesome black vulture perched on a lower rung. He was
looking around as if thinking, “Where the hell is everybody?”

Read More »

OK, so, to recap my earlier post: the speed of light is a hard-and-fast limit for any object with a rest mass greater than zero (Basically, everything that isn’t a subatomic particle. You know—space ships, astronauts, baseballs, magic ducks…) (not to mention the fact that due to the nature of infinity, the scientist doesn’t get the girl/ boy. Damn it!)(For grins, here’s a great site at Cornell University where they provide clear, non-techno-saturated answers to people’s questions about concepts of astronomy and physics, including the speed of light, and here is an IBM paper in which the authors provide a theoretical proof that teleportation is possible, via circumvention of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which is another limit you can bump into when contemplating certain cool SF effects)But wait—have you ever wondered why? I mean, why is there a speed limit at all? Quack! Quack! You just asked the right question. Give that kid a hundred dollar bill.

Read More »

The US Postal Service has announced a new stamp honoring Ella Fitzgerald. I know nothing much about Fitzgerald except, of course, for her wonderful voice; reading the AP piece it was nice to find out that she was, apparently, as down to earth as she seemed despite all the acclaim she recieved over the years. I do think, though, that whoever edited the AP article from which I got this information might have ended it on a note other than Fitzgerald’s participation in a Memorex ad.

Fitzgerald’s son said that he hoped people unfamiliar with his mother’s singing would see the stamp and wonder who she was, and be moved to find out. If only someone would invent singing stamps! Then everyone would know, and the mailbox would hum on the streetcorner. I think that would be cool.

A little over two years ago I got sick. I had a life threatening, life changing illness that also happened to be pretty curable (Hodgkins Lymphoma). I learned lots of life lessons and had lots of material for a blog. I went through six months of chemo (which sounds more horrible than it was, although I wouldn’t recommend it recreationally.) I did not get thin (proof that chemo is not nearly as horrible as it used to be and both a relief and mildly disappointing—and let me tell you, oncologists have no sense of humor when it comes to the issue of losing weight.*)
Read More »

A physicist friend taught me something really cool once that I thought I’d share.

I’m an engineer. Those of you who know engineers know that when it comes to theory… well, let’s just say, we like empiricism juuuuust fine. This truism (which like most truisms isn’t really true; without theory we engineers would have nothing to work with in coming up with practical applications, and without empirical data, scientists would have no way to falsify and thus prove their theories; still, there is a grain of truth there) is best explained by a mathematics joke illustrating infinity by halves.

Imagine that a scientist and an engineer are standing across the room from your favorite movie star, who is giving them both the bedroom eyes and showing them gorgeous female cleavage/ male pecs (depending on your preferences). Put yourself in their shoes. Ooh la la! They want you, you want them; let’s go, baby!

But Einstein’s ghost appears, looking sympathetic yet unyielding, and puts up a hand. “I’m sorry, my friend,” he says, “but you may travel only by halves in each move.”

In other words, you may go half the distance in the first move, and in the second move half the remaining distance, and so on.

Read More »

I was working on this post and its associated materials when the Eat Our Brains host went down. After waiting until two in the morning I gave up, so, you get it this morning.

---

I wrote “The Touch of Their Eyes” in 1979 and sent it into a contest/workshop that was being run by AggieCon, my home convention. (Back in 1974 it was the first convention I’d ever been to and I chaired Aggiecon V the following year.) The stories were going to be evaluated by the Guest of Honor that year–Theodore Sturgeon.Now, this was only the second story I’d ever completed. My first, a story called mumbledy-mumbledy, I sent off to Analog and it was rejected with a personal letter by Ben Bova who was editor at that time. I understood that to be a fairly encouraging thing–the letter actually said let me see your future work.Now, “Touch” reached the convention committee on time but it was apparently slightly over the length requirements so there was some debate as to whether they would be forwarding the story to Mr. Sturgeon or not. Eventually they did, though.

I showed up for the convention and was told, “He didn’t get your manuscript. It missed him in travel. We’ve given him the mss when he got here but we don’t know if he’ll be able to read it.”

Well, the workshop was in two hours–the first day of the convention. I didn’t have high hopes, but I showed up for the program slot anyway.

Read More »

You won’t like this one unless you’re into hot lesbian robot babes: All is Full of Love

(Did I already post that link here? I know I did at KVR, but a quick search of my posts here doesn’t find it….)

I think I’ll revisit this entry and add to it some more later. Brainiacs, feel free to log in and add to this post…

:

And a Spaghetti Western Bollywood dance extravaganza: Mukkala Mukkabala
Read More »

“It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” – Mark Twain

Addictions are such complex things that the subject has filled thousands of books. For me to post about them means that I have to really narrow down the discussion, because I was a substance abuse counselor for 17 years and know too damn much on the subject.

I’ve also had, and still have, lots of hard-to-kick bad habits.

I started at some point in counseling sessions to call addictions ‘bad habits’. Not to trivialize them, but to normalize them and to point out that almost everyone has addictions of varying severity. And, like other, lesser bad habits, we come to engage in them with almost no conscious thought. They permeate our being and our life. As good addicts we’ll get our brain-fix well before we actually notice that we’re withdrawing.

I quit smoking again this New Year’s Day. Since then, I’ve been eating most everything that doesn’t get out of the way, but that’s starting to subside a bit already.

I think this is going to be a good quit. I’m not craving tobacco, and I don’t feel deprived by its absence in my life. I’ve had bad quits, ones which don’t last very long, and I missed the drug every minute of them, until finally surrendering.

Here ‘s the narrow thing that I want to discuss tonight:

Read More »

So, in response to Rory’s link to the cat herders I offer this brilliant piece of irrelevant advertising. And I don’t even drink beer.

I’m about to go out for a walk to contemplate the burgeoning brilliance of my post for today.

(Yeah. I’m trying to figure out what the hell to write about….)

In the meantime, it’s occurred to me that there might still be a very few people in the world who haven’t yet seen my favorite net vid:

Herding Cats

See y’all in a little while.

Note to myself: I’ve actually bought the software for capturing a pic of a vid so that my EOB posts will all be graphically rich. Now all I have to do is download, install, and learn how to use said software. Real Soon Now.

Although I think they made the head a touch too small. Still and all.

When Morgan blogged about Jessca Hagy’s site Indexed, I found the card below painfully apropos.

The Dude was sick over the holidays, so instead of going out to see a movie every day of his vacation like we’d planned, I watched him play “Zelda” and snuffle. This is less attractive than it sounds.

And when he wasn’t playing Zelda, we were vegging and watching TV. Of course, it being the holidays, the pickings were slim for those of us who can only take so much Xmas cheer. This is how we ended up watching a mini-marathon of a really dreadful show called Dr.90210. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

Dr. 90210 is a reality show about plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills. And it’s about as bad you’re imaging, but in a bizarre train- wreck -can’t- stop- watching- it kinda way. First, every show featured a woman who was having some kind of breast surgery. Most of them were augmentation, but some were reconstructions. The one consistent theme in this show is that women are really, really, really unhappy with their bosoms.

Read More »

I am travelling on business, and my internet connection is cutting in and out — so my Friday post will be delayed till tomorrow when I get back home. Apologies for the delay.

Eleanora Duse was a contemporary of the French actress Sarah Bernhardt and the English actress Ellen Terry. One of the three great actresses of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. She was famous for her naturalism, a kind of Meryl Streep of her day. She did the plays of her day—Shakespeare, plays based on Zola’s writings, melodramas. One critic describes her transcendent acting and how it lifted a traditional melodrama. In moment of extreme emotion, the convention of the day was that the heroine crossed her arms across her chest and lifted her eye to the heavens.

In the scene where the husband (that cad) abandons his young wife and child, the critic described how the actress stood with the boy playing her son pressed against her skirts and when the husband delivers the news, she reaches down and gently crossed the boy’s arms against his chest. There was apparently not a dry eye in the house. Read More »