Tonight, I have three major essays fighting it out in my head. They’re seriously intentioned, and will require more research if I’m going to be honest in talking about them. And there’s the Starship Troopers / Heinlein thing still hanging fire in my brain.

I’m not unwilling to do the work, because the topics interest me a lot, but there’s been talk among us Brainiacs regarding the pros and cons of logorrhea in blogging. It seems that, sometimes, the longer and denser and more complex a post we post, the less commenting. I’m guilty of wanting to slurp up more comments. So I’m going to experiment with brevity, which goes against my nature.

Instead of my usual explorations of wisdom and insight, here are a couple of questions.

Just how much do you despise those people who talk on cell phones while they drive their SUVs over your motorcycle?

How about the ones who talk loudly in the booth behind you while you’re trying to have a quiet meal with meat-space friends.

How about in the bookstore? Or even in the library, which, as we know, is a holy space?

If you could SHUT THEM UP, would you?

Check out the nifty Personal Cell Phone Signal Blocker Device, which is illegal in the US. Especially in Alabama, because it doubles as a sex toy.

If you could get away with it, would you buy one? Are there limits on how you would use it?

Personally, I think there should be a bounty on cell-phone junkies. Say, $50 a head.

But that’s just me…

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Tonight we have some more trans-Atlantic rock and roll from Pure Reason Revolution. They’re a relatively young band, and I like their bombastic high-skill symphonic-style prog. They cheated in this vid by laying the studio sound track on top of the festival performance video.

You might surmise that they listened to some Pink Floyd while they were growing up. Click the pic for a ten-minute vid with several songs in it.

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I made food for the sometime Two-Headed Baby band last weekend.  Now normally, we get barbeque when we play at Barb and Brad’s.  And now that we jam at Bob and Maureen’s every other week, Maureen cooks.

And that’s how I came to realize the Not Maureen-ness of me.

You see, Maureen approaches cooking like a conductor approaches a new score.  If you’ve been reading EOB, you know that she also writes about cooking in an elegy-like way.  (Some examples are here.  Go.  Read.  I can wait.)

Okay, so now you know just how lyrically she writes about food (and cooks for that matter).

It’s just a little daunting for the likes of me, because this is how I approach cooking: 

Brisket

1)      Get Brisket from store.  Spend ten minutes in front of open cooler debating what size brisket to get.  Get uncomfortably cold. Choose brisket you’re currently holding when you realize you’re too nippley to be out in public. Hold brisket in front of chest until you’re out of cold section.

2)      Take brisket home.  Open packaging and torment dog with bloody wrapper.  Throw wrapper into garbage.  Dog worships at the altar of the garbage can for the rest of the afternoon.

3)      Put brisket into pan.  Curse when you realize brisket is too big for current pan and requires the larger pan which currently lives in the most inconvenient spot in the house. Open closet where pan lives and Fibber McGee your way inside.  Locate pan and then spend the next two hours putting closet back together.

4)      Put brisket into new larger pan.  Pour beer over brisket until it comes half-way up the side of brisket.  Drink rest of beer. Decide the brisket needs just a touch more beer.  Add another dollop of beer from new bottle.  Drink rest of second beer.  Read More »

We’ve come to think of photographs as some sort of representation of reality but this technology really freaks me out. Watch it all the way through to the point where they “weight” which persons disappear first when you need to resize the photo.

Dear Mr. Helpful Guy: My home’s water softener needs to be replaced. The new unit was delivered today, but it still needs to be installed. Can I do the necessary work on my own, or should I hire professionals? Signed, Maybe Do-It-Myself

Dear Maybe DIM: You should absolutely do this job yourself. Swapping out an old water softener for a new one is an easy task requiring only fourteen or fifteen hours of spare time and a few basic tools such as a pipe wrench, crescent wrench, ballpeen and claw hammers, rubber mallet, Teflon plumber’s tape, blowtorch, solder, block-and-tackle, jackhammer, and Adams trowel. Put on your grubbiest jeans and go for it! Signed, Mr. Helpful Guy

Dear Mr. Helpful Guy: What the hell is an Adams trowel? Signed, DIM

Dear DIM: Don’t worry about it. You probably won’t need it. As long as you have everything else, you can get started. Signed, MHG

Dear MHG: I don’t know. I’m supposed to be writing a novel. Won’t it be a better use of my time to work on the book and hire someone else to do the water-softener job?

Dear DIM: That depends. What kind of advance are you expecting?

Dear MHG: Okay, I’m ready to start on the water-softener project. What’s my first step?

Dear DIM: First, turn off the water supply to your home. Then open a few faucets to bleed off the pressure, close them back up to avoid creating a siphon, and disconnect the old water-softening unit. Since you’re throwing this thing away, there’s no need to be pretty about it. Don’t be afraid to destroy whatever you won’t be keeping. Access your inner ape. Just be sure your supply lines and any non-replaceable connections stay intact.

Dear MHG: Ack! I did what you said, and there’s water everywhere!

Dear DIM: This is normal, I think.

Dear MHG: It won’t stop! It won’t stop! What do I do? My wife will be home soon, and there’s water everywhere!

Dear DIM: Call your wife and tell her that you’ve discovered your household is dangerously low on toilet paper. She will detour to buy more, and this will buy you some time.

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There are a few things we do in life which involve handing ourselves over to the tender mercies of others—other institutions, other people. Medical procedures are one. Helpless and confused, we take off our clothes, our shoes, our glasses. Blinking and bewildered, we are sedated, numbed, probed, injected, x-rayed. We expect it to be a less that pleasant experience. And it usually is. But there is more and more a concerted effort to make it as minimally unpleasant as possible.

Airline travel seems to be going the other way. Read More »

“Everybody’s a Critic,” the line goes. Well no, not quite. It takes a certain amount of balls, as well as an organized mind and a distinct point of view, to really be a critic in a meaningful way. And via Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light, I hear that the author of LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization is suing critic PZ Myers for writing a review of his book.

Specifically, he’s upset that Myers didn’t like the book, that he dismissed it on the grounds of being lousy science–or non-science masquerading as science–and that he called the author, Stuart Pivar, a crackpot. Frankly, given what I could understand of Pivar’s theories, it sounds like Myers was only saying sooth; still, I can’t imagine that Pivar enjoyed it. Do I think he has a legal leg upon which to stand? Not hardly. And in any case, talking back to critics is almost always a bad idea. I mean, I can think of situations in which it might not be so bad, but for the most…reallio-trulio not smart.

Case in point. I knew someone once who sent my mother her novel. This was before I started publishing anything, and mom was the only person this woman knew who might know someone in publishing. And so…she sent her novel to mom; mom read the book–an arid, grim novel about the intertwined lives of academics at a small college. She gave it to me to read. It was so unlike anything I would have read by choice that I couldn’t think of a thing to say about it. But mom had a friend who did this stuff for a living, and she sent the book to her. And that critic wrote the novelist a long letter, explaining why the book, in the shape it enjoyed at that moment, was not publishable. Not just a “this doesn’t suit our needs at this time” letter, but a thoughtful, well-crafted critique of the book, with suggestions about where work was needed to render it publishable. Short of getting a letter back saying “Hey, love your book and want to publish it,” this is the sort of letter a writer dreams of getting.

Mom’s friend was livid. She wrote a long letter right back to the critic explaining why she was wrong, and including the raves she’d gotten from her friends. She didn’t hear back from the critic, who was smart enough not to feed the energy-monster. My mother, hearing the story from her friend and from the critic, shook her head and apologized to the critic. End of story. Except that when I think of this, I hope the writer took up a different line of work, because the only kind of word-of-mouth she’d be getting wouldn’t have helped her.

When I read a negative review of my work, it hurts. Why wouldn’t it? It’s like someone dissing my child. But I know better than to say anything back; there’s no upside to it. If the critic’s given a thoughtful critique, I might learn something. If the critic’s a jerk…don’t engage with jerks, it just tires you and feeds them. I don’t engage. I don’t sue. Not even if someone calls me a crackpot.

…was the official pub date of Jumper: Griffin’s Story. I got a case of them in the mail, myself. They look like this.

The paperback edition will be released February 2008 in conjunction with the movie and it will have movie cover art. Oooooh.

Okay, guys, I seem to be getting more brain-damaged by the minute, rather than less, tonight. I probably won’t post my lengthy meditation on Heinlein just yet. But it’s a fascinating subject and I will get to it.

In the meantime, I was placidly surfing the TWT Forums a minute ago. It’s where Texas bikers hang out. Props to Keith for posting the link to the following vid. It’s sweet and warm and made me laugh orange juice out of my nose at several points. You probably don’t even have to be a biker to enjoy it. Click the pic.

ADDENDUM: I just got off the phone with She Who Is Awesome. She’s fallen in lust with the Ultimate Motorcycle, as have I. This is the 2004 Limited Edition 1800cc Honda Valkyrie Rune. Its original price started at $25K, before you piled on the optionals. The YouTube vid is here. Ooh, and check this video review of it, here! This baby will take you to Valhalla in style. A couple are on offer at Ebay now for under 20K. Cheap.

I found the last one of these linked from Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Sidelights which led me to the others. I’d only seen the middle one before. Watch them in order and it just gets better.

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So, I’ve been travelling a lot and running errands and starting the new book so I’d not checked in to Making Light over the last couple of weeks. There are a lot of interesting posts over there but one of them just blew my mind.

Bookstore chain puts the screws on small publishers

A&R Whitcoulls Group, a.k.a. the Angus & Robertson bookstore chain, is Australia’s largest bookseller, with 180 bookstores and about 20% of the retail market. A&R’s owners, an outfit called Pacific Equity Partners, are thinking of taking it public.

This may or may not have been why A&R’s commercial manager, Charlie Rimmer, sent a startlingly arrogant letter to Australia’s smaller publishers and distributors, demanding a substantial payment from each by August 17 (reportedly ranging from AU$2,500 to AU$20,000) if they want A&R to keep selling their books.

One of the publishers, Tower Books, made the letter (and their reply) public.  It’s brilliant.

This is another one of my posts where I’m thinking, “Hey, you guys probably already know all about this, but what the Hell….”

I’ve written before that Robert Heinlein was like unto a god for me, cementing my teen addiction to scienti-fiction, as well as shaping a lot of my political and ethical beliefs. He was one of the Big Three who basically invented the genre as we know it today. If you come new to his early and middle-period work, you may find yourself muttering “Hey, this stuff is pretty well done, but it’s such a total cliché.”

When Heinlein wrote that stuff, it wasn’t a cliché. He was the first. Everybody else has merely been trying to ring changes on themes and ideas that he explored, usually damn near definitively. Check out ‘All You Zombies’ and ‘By His Bootstraps’, for instance, if you want to see him totally own the time-travel story for reciprocating eternity.

Needless to say, I was delighted when I read the announcement in 1996 that one of Heinlein’s best, most influential novels, ‘Starship Troopers’, was being made into a big-budget movie. I had great hopes that my favorite book was going to be made into an immortal flick. It was to be directed by Paul Verhoeven, of ‘Robocop’ fame.

Then they revealed that the movie was going to omit the Mobile Infantry’s powered armor suits, due to budgetary constraints.

I knew then that they were going to shit all over the crown jewel in my orchard of adolescent bookworm memories. (Yeah, yeah. Mixed metaphor. Bite me. You know how I am about metaphors.)

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Dr. Mark Serreze, a Senior Research Scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, reports that as long as we’ve been tracking sea ice by satellite imaging, this week marks the lowest amount ever recorded. The previous low was at the end of the 2005 melting season in September. We’ve passed that record in mid-august with a full month of the melting season still to go.

Click the pic to enlarge. Go here for more info.

Says Sheldon Drobot of CU-Boulder’s Colorado Center for Astrodynamics:

Arctic sea ice is “one of the better predictors of climate change on Earth. There will probably be about two-thirds as much sea this September as there was 25 years ago, a good indication that something significant is happening with the climate.”

Could this be climate change?  Well it’s sure not anal bleaching.

The following emails were recovered from a laptop left on a Greyhound bus.  The identity of the laptop’s owner hasn’t been released…

Dear T.B.,

It’s only been a week since you left.  But every day I think again to myself, “How will I go on without him?”

Oh, it’s not just because I lean on you for all sorts of decision-making, but I miss the sound of your voice.  How you used to use it to quiet me like a frightened stallion.

Oh, I know Condi thinks she can step into your place.  But, though I find her tall, black, pointy-toed boots strangely appealing, it’s your soft, pinky-white flesh that I crave the most.

I get misty-eyed remembering how you clapped your chubby hands with glee as you excitedly leaked the name of an enemy’s wife to a trusted toady.  I miss how you so adored creating false memes to distract the cowardly press and the idiot public.  And how can I forget the way you pressed your plump fists to your mouth and squealed with hysterical delight while watching Fox News parrot your talking points?

I have never wanted you more than at moments such as these.

Sweet, sweet Turd Blossom, I am counting the days until we can reunite in that shining land of opportunity and corruption.  (God BlessTexas!)  I can’t wait to continue our great partnership once more.  (And, yes, I have been taking the shots.  Dick gives me one every morning.)

Yours eternally,

Shrubbykins

Dear Muffy-snookims-shrubby-namikins,

Oh, my darling, I was so afraid that you had become too used to me.  That you had grown tired of my ways.  I know you always said I was the most important person in your life, (after Jesus, of course), but still I worried that once I was gone you would find someone else to fill my tiny loafers.

I miss your special ways, too.  That magical, utterly fake, twang you use to caress your many delightful malapropisms.  I miss how you grabbed the ass of the German Prime Minister just to prove you were a real man. (As if you would ever have to prove that to me!)

I’ve adored you from the moment I saw you coming off that train in Midland.  The way the dust swirled around your head like a worshipful swarm of noseeums.  You carried yourself like a young Greek god.  You had more charisma than anyone I’d ever seen before.  I knew then that we were meant to be.

I must away, my heart.  Darby is yelling for me to come to dinner.  Only a few months and we can be reunited.

Yours eternally,

Turdy  Read More »

Maureen worked like crazy on our lovely Board of Directors dinner and she said, “It was perfect. Everytime I looked up hands were waving and people were talking and laughing and having a wonderful time.” She later confessed if we hadn’t, Plan B was to get us all totally shitfaced.

Still, I think the picture below really shows the evening.