Well, hell. I’ve been thinking a bit this week about writing about the whole Craig / gay / Republican / hypocrisy ball of maggots.

I spent a couple of decades living in the Montrose in Houston, which is probably the third largest congregation of gays in the country, now that New Orleans is no more. I didn’t think I had anything all that unique or brilliant to say, but I do have some thoughts on the subject.

But Erin O’Brien just ruined it all for me with this post. It’s damn near definitive. And sad as can be.

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As proof that, like Larry Craig, but completely unlike him in every way, I Am Not Gay, I’d like to offer that I really get a thrill out of this pic of Erin’s puppies. Hey, even if I was gay, I’d certainly respect them.

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(So, maybe you’re thinking it’s unseemly to have a pic of Erin’s puppies on the dignified and scholarly front page of EOB. I have lots of pics of cute pussies - that Steve took! - that I can post instead.)

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Stavinoha, a middle-aged man with a shaved head, said, “It’s certainly better than we can get from this solar system.” Stavinoha was the last person off the Planet Earth, launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in a converted ICBM six weeks after the earth’s mantle was breached at Teheran and, miraculously, snagged at the peak of his ballistic arc by an American Epsilon Class Orbital Tug. Unlike the rest of them, he knew first-hand how bad conditions were on the planet.

The temperatures at earth’s equator hovered around 4 degrees Centigrade. Snowstorms and high altitude dust clouded the planet.

Herrin continued. “There are seven thousand humans on the moon in facilities designed for six hundred. If we don’t do something about reducing the load on our current resources, everyone will die. Given our current status, we might die even if we do reduce the load.”

One of my lines is that “Science Fiction predicts the future like a shotgun kills a duck.” In other words, out of all these little pellets flying around, only a few hit a target. My 1998 novel Helm (excerpt from the prolog above) starts with seven-thousand people on the moon and none left alive on earth.

Now this is the sort of pellet I don’t want hitting any ducks, but it seems the idea is out there. Here’s an article at National Geographic that proposes our moon base become a “Lunar Ark” in the event of a catastrophic impact event destroying the earth’s biosphere.

Huh.

Once upon a time I was an unpublished author. What time? Well, looking at my bibliography you could tell that this was about 27 years ago, this month. (The September issue of Analog showed up in late August of 1980.) I was mumbledy years old. Uh, okay, I was 25, though the sale happened while I was 24. It was Analog/Astounding’s 50th anniversary so they’d commissioned a bunch of special stories and “The Touch of Their Eyes” had to wait for a slot.

It took me a couple of years after that to sell the two more stories that let me become a full member of the Science Fiction Writers of America. (Quite a bit later, the organization’s name became the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America but the single F is understood to have another F right under it. How’s that for fantasy?)

We all wanted to join the club (though it isn’t a club, though it often acts like one; the sort of club with a sign that says “no gurlz aloud.”) If you were in the club, you were an honest-to-god writer. You got to get into the cool parties at WorldCon. You stood around and listened to heads older-and-wiser (and often drunker) than you.

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Mackris v. O’Reilly is an oratorio for 28-piece chamber orchestra, 26-voice chorus and three soloists (soprano, tenor and baritone) set to the original court complaint filed against pundit, Bill O’Reilly, on October 13, 2004 and O’Reilly’s on-air settlement announcement given on October 29, 2004. The style of the piece is a traditional neo-baroque that makes the most of the oratorio format. Its 31 parts include seven chorales, two madrigals, three choruses (parts of the chorus matched up with components from the orchestra), four stand-alone recitatives, two instrumental entrances and numerous arias. All of these parts add up to a two-plus hour running time.

Libretto. Some audio samples. The Background of this Sexual Harassment case.