She Who Is Awesome turned me on to this site tonight. I googled it a bit, and got a lot of hits, but, just in case you’ve missed it like I had…

I’m not much of a Garfield fan, but the strips without him are disturbingly funny-sad-brilliant. Click the pic for so much more.

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Via the fabulousness that is Making Light, this:

and a whole slew of other really cool, really twisted knitting. This is don’t-try-this-at-home fiber art, kids–no namby-pamby cable knit or fair isle nonsense here. Though I think the stool on which the tray, sword, and head rest is an actual un-knit stool.

So, the Pew Center on the States reports that 1 in 100 American adults is in our prison and jail system, a rate that exceeds every other country on earth.

In response, both the New York Post and the New York Times have published pieces which say, in essence, “Yeah, but we’ve got the lowest crime rates in the last fifty years.”

It’s interesting that New York publications say this because more than any other state in the US, the number of prisoners and prisons they have is actually down 17%. So I guess the increases in other states prison populations is keeping the crime rate down in New York.

Huh?

It’s also interesting that Texas, with one of the largest prison systems in the country, had decided that it can no longer maintain such a large prison population. Rather than increase the number of cells, legislators from both parties are instead spending half a billion on other programs to cut down on that population including “a dramatic expansion of drug treatment and diversion beds.”

The fact is that there are people in prison who should be there. But, unfortunately, there are a huge number who pose no threat to their communities and would be better served through some combination of drug treatment, probation, and job training.

Here’s the report.

Tonight’s music vid from me is a little more esoteric than my usual. Thanks to Peter Kirn at CreateDigitalMusic for this one.

Rob Webster is on the staff at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station. He makes music from found sounds, among other things. You don’t need to adjust your volume levels; this one is silent for the first thirty-odd seconds. It’s got some great music and some gorgeous landscape in it.

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Rob also went down into a crevasse and hit the ice there with various implements of musical destruction. I really like what he came back up with.

Crevasse

Here’s him playing his djembe in the crevasse.

Besides actually enjoying his music, I deeply respect what Rob is doing, making magic with the most unlikely ingredients in the most unlikely place on the planet.

If you want to hear more and learn more about Rob and his music, you can hit his site. There’s some fascinating stuff there.

And, if you find yourself wanting to know more about the Station, here’s the site for the British Antarctic Survey. Lotsa info, images, and a few vids.

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Jeff Fecke at Shakesville has really been on a roll. He’s been blogging the Obama-Rev. Wright controversy, and has this to say:

Look, I know many of the readers of this blog have wandered from the religious paths we once followed. But having belonged to churches over the years, I can tell you that I didn’t always agree with what my minister was saying; still don’t, always. Nobody’s said anything as outlandish as Wright’s anti-Hillary sermon, but I’ve definitely heard people say things I disagree with, and say them from the pulpit. And criminy, I’m a Unitarian.

I have a good friend who’s Catholic, as is his wife. They’re also in favor of birth control, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-women’s equality. So why do they remain in the church? Well, it’s where they feel most connected spiritually. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things they disagree with in their church, nor that they weren’t disappointed by the selection of the current pope. But they still feel grounded in that church.

So do I tell my friend that he’s horrible for staying in a church that sometimes preaches things at odds with what he believes? No, I don’t, because I’m quite fine with him finding and staying in a church he feels connected to. And I feel the same way toward my friends who are atheists and agnostics and Lutherans and Methodists…all of us find things we disagree with in our chosen faith traditions, but that doesn’t mean we must chuck them all.

Obama seems to be saying that he found faith in his church, but not necessarily a political ideology. Unstated, but also true, Obama found a community in that church — one of the major reasons people join churches is to find community, after all. …
Will the conservatives make an issue of this in the fall? Of course they will, but they were going to blow something up ridiculously out of proportion. If they didn’t have this, they would have run ads comparing Obama to Farrakhan. If Clinton somehow gets the nomination, they’ll run ads saying Hillary Clinton was a secret lesbian who killed her lover Vince Foster. If John Edwards is given the nomination somehow, we’ll hear that he used his wife’s cancer to get ahead.

If 2004 taught us anything, it’s that the conservatives will seize onto anything, no matter how small, and use it to tar good people. Barack Obama joined a large, prominent African American church, one that included among its membership Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan. And at that church, he found community and a faith that fit him — as well as a minister who sometimes went over the top. Obama’s now said, flatly, that when his minister went over the top, that was wrong. I was satisfied when the Clinton campaign rebuked the statements by Ferraro, and I’m satisfied with Obama rebuking these statements by Wright. As for this sentence — “I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it’s on the campaign stump or in the pulpit.” — everyone’s chosen candidate should tattoo that to their foreheads.

I have to say, I have been impressed with how Obama has been handling this controversy.

Jeff goes on in a later post on the subject to point out that calling out racism isn’t racist, and anger isn’t hate.

Anyway, go RTWT.

… cello. Look, Caroline! Leather pants, rockin’ drums. Metallica.

Original

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OK, I’m probably going to piss off some of our Loyal Readers, here, but I have to say this. Jeff Fecke over at Shakesville nails it:

I am truly frustrated with both sides in this struggle for the Democratic party’s nomination. I should not be surprised, of course; we have the first viable female candidate and the first viable person of color running against each other. And while it would be nice if everything was positive and happy and upbeat, sadly we seem bent on playing the more-oppressed-than-thou game, where Geraldine Ferraro comes out and says Obama is where he is because he’s an African-American, and where Wright forgets that Clinton may not have had to overcome racism, but she’s surely had to overcome sexism.

The idea that Clinton–wink, wink–makes room for the racists, and there’s a place–nudge, nudge–for sexists in Obama’s camp is repugnant. It’s simply inverted identity politics. We need the candidates to show some leadership and stop allowing their supporters to play Oppression Olympics.

Read the whole thing.

Update: TalkingPointsMemo reports that the two candidates have spoken privately and agreed to rein in their trash-talking supporters, for the sake of the party. Good on them.

Or too explicit?

SF Signal does this regular thing called Mind Meld where they ask the same question of several different people in the field.  This week’s goes, “Is Young Adult SF/F Too Explicit?” People answering included Ellen Datlow, Kaza Kingsley, Derryl Murphy, Farah Mendlesohn, Ben Jeapes, Gwenda Bond, and me.

Here was my response.

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If that doesn’t make it considered to be a hit, I don’t know what will. It had an okay week domestically, but is apparently still kicking butt around the world.

It’s #1 worldwide for 2008 so far, and, more tellingly, #33 within the last 365 days.

Here are the totals at our buddy BoxOfficeMojo.

Here are the international numbers.

It’s pulled in the most money from the UK, as expected. But the number two market is South Korea, at 10 million. What’s that all about?

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On Sunday morning our kitchen looked like this:

Now it looks like this:

The dog is not amused. The rest of us, on the other hand, are enjoying it. The echoes please the former-sound-editor Spouse. The thought of take out several times a week pleases Avocado and Sarcasm Girl. And your humble Madeleine is rather enjoying the challenge of trying to “cook” in a kitchen where the refrigerator and gas grill are in the back yard, the food is in the basement, and the microwave and toaster are on my desk.

I’ve decided that, now that Jumper (the movie) has made it all the way to the screen, I’m going to stop blogging every little interview, event, and assorted reviews here on EoB. I’m still going to be writing about that over at my solo blog but not duplicate every one of those posts over here. What I will do, though, is post little summary links over to my posts at Unconvincing Narrative on occasion, like so:

Интервю с писателят Стивън Гулд (Bulgarian Interview with me.)

4 Pages (in Starlog magazine)

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In other news, Brad is making March an Internet-Free month, and won’t be posting again until April. We tried to get Uncle Buzzkill to stand in for him but Brad won’t let him out of the garden shed. Instead we will be having a few guest posts on Thursdays in March.

***RED ALERT! DON CRASH HELMETS! PERSONAL DATA AHEAD***

Next week and the week after, I shall Sequester myself at a Secret Locale for my Second Annual Writer’s Retreat. (This means no Morgan posts for those two weeks. I have some great stuff planned, though, for when I get back…tee hee) My primary goals for this retreat are to finish revisions for Feral Sapiens for Tor, and if there is time, to make further progress on a short story I started a while back (about which more anon).

Writing never used to come hard for me, but it does now.

Writing requires creating a space for yourself as a writer. You have to be willing to suck it up, say no to all the other important things in your life clamoring for attention (work, family, friends, chores and other responsibilities, often even sleep). You must tune them all out. Forget about paying the bills, getting the laundry done, forget how tired you are and stop worrying about how you are going to meet that work deadline, ignore what’s going to happen next week, month, year. You tune out the noise, sink into a private expanse that’s all about make-believe. The outer world ceases to exist.

That act of shutting everything else out used to come easy for me. I love the act of creation. But I spoiled it for myself, by going to work as an engineering consultant in the early ‘oughts.

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Never trust a man, who when left alone with a tea cosey… Doesn’t try it on.–Billy Connolly

Now, I’m the kind of guy who believes in transparency in public affairs and a kind of public integrity for pretty much everybody. You want to act like an asshole, fine, just so you’re up front about it. This doesn’t meant I want every thought in my head to be public knowledge but I’m pretty up front about my general beliefs even though I would be embarrassed, probably to have all my opinions spread across the internet.

I have friends whose writing I love and friends whose writing I don’t care for and people I don’t consider friends who, for some unknown reason, consider me their dearest buddy. I am polite in public and sometimes this means just a little bit less than completely honest.

So, one thing I want to be really careful about is not saying stuff in venue that will hurt people’s feelings. So, this kind of relates to Mad’s post about the train wreck that is The Moment of Truth. Both that and the following really fit into the category “What on Earth were they thinking?!”

An American insurance company, in defending its refusal to pay out a claim, is seeking to call in evidence personal online postings, including the contents of any MySpace or Facebook pages the litigants may have, to see if their eating disorders might have “emotional causes”. And the case is far from a lone one. Suddenly, those saucy pictures and intimate confessions on social networking sites can be taken down and used in evidence against you in ways never dreamed of.

In the US, a sex assault victim seeking compensation faces the prospect of her MySpace and Facebook pages being produced in court. In Texas, a driver whose car was involved in a fatal accident found his MySpace postings (“I’m not an alcoholic, I’m a drunkaholic”) part of the prosecution’s case. From Los Angeles to Lowestoft, thousands of social network site users have lost their jobs – or failed to clinch new ones – because of their pages’ contents. Police, colleges and schools are monitoring MySpace and Facebook pages for what they deem to be “inappropriate” content. Online security holes and users’ naivety are combining to cause privacy breaches and identity thefts. And what all this, and more, adds up to is this: online social networking can seriously damage your life.

Just ask the 27 workers at the Automobile Club of Southern California fired for messages about colleagues on their MySpace sites; the Florida sheriff’s deputy whose MySpace page revealed his heavy drinking and fascination with female breasts – and swiftly found himself handing in his badge; the Argos worker in Wokingham fired for saying on Facebook that working at the firm was “shit”; the Las Vegas teacher at a Catholic school fired after he declared himself gay on his MySpace page; the staff of an Ottawa grocery chain fired for their “negative comments” on Facebook; the 19 Northampton police officers investigated for Facebook comments; and Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank, who told his employers he had a family emergency, but whose Facebook page revealed he had, in reality, been cavorting in drag at a Hallowe’en party.

“Facebook Can Ruin Your Life” at The Independent

This made me smile. Via Shakesville. NSFW.

 

The video is a mini-documentary promoting a nifty new website, Do The Green Thing.