Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you — Mr. Jesse Hawkins and Mrs. Rachael Hawkins.
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They were married last Saturday afternoon in an outdoor amphitheatre at BrownwoodState Park, to my delight and to the applause of approximately 45 friends and family.
This is the terrible loss that I suffered, mentioned in my previous post. I gave up my most beloved daughter – but gained both a wonderful son-in-law and a vast herd of cattle in payment.
Two Headed Baby played a special gig last weekend.
It was a good weekend for me, in many, many ways. I’m planning to post in more detail on that later today or perhaps tomorrow.
I set up a laptop to record the gig as best I could through a single mic off to the side, and seem to have caught about two-thirds of it on disk. I’ve just finished processing a couple of the songs, and thought you might enjoy listening to THB in full fury.
Rachael was there, and told me that we sounded awesome, but she was being especially kind to her Papa last weekend, because I was suffering a great loss. The audience danced their asses off, and didn’t throw anything sharp or too hard at us. I figure that we probably didn’t suck, much.
As you may know, our old drummer got bored with just hitting things and wandered off to try to learn how to be another goddam dime-a-dozen guitar player. Bob Yeager, who still enjoys smashing the hell out of everything, has gracefully taken his place.
Caroline Spector on bass, cello, and vocals, Warren Spector on rhythm and lead guitar, Gilda Ginsel on vocals and keyboard, my nice friend Bradley Denton on vocals, harp, and rhythm and lead guitar. I was up there, too, mostly played rhythm guitar.
However, we made the mistake of allowing both GreyLion and Bulky Jones to sit in. And they wanked endlessly. Please forgive them.
I’ve whined repeatedly about the Loudness Wars, but – I smashed the hell out these recordings, just because it seemed the rock ‘n roll thing to do. Another mea culpa for that. I tried to leave a few dynamics in place.
This stuff is meant to be played loud, though, so you should turn the volume knob all the way to the right. I hope your neighbors don’t find it too painful to listen to.
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Pics credit to Cheryl Collum, who, incidentally, happens to be my baby sister.
If the coffee pot has a dark, reddish-orange stain, it might’ve been used to brew methamphetamine, and the resulting coffee could be hazardous to your health. If there’s a chemical smell in the room, that’s another red flag.
In keeping with our occasional “where’s my flying car?” motif, I thought I’d pass along this little goody. The Denver Post reports that daredevil Eric Scott successfully avoided plummeting to his death in Royal Gorge with a 135-pound rocket-powered backpack strapped to him.
The pack, designed by aerospace engineer Eric Strauss, carried Scott across the 1,500 foot wide, 1,053 foot deep canyon. According to the Post, he had 33 seconds of fuel, and made it across in 25. Plenty of time to spare!
Troy Widgery, founder of Jetpack International, the company that created the pack, is pursuing a childhood dream. Next up, he says, is a pack with three turbines, capable of staying aloft for nine minutes and crossing the Grand Canyon.
Update:CBS News has the story, too. Both the Denver Post and CBS have video of the flight, and CBS has an interview with Scott. CBS is saying the flight took either 21 or 23 seconds, and he had a total of 30 seconds of hydrogen peroxide fuel. Either way, he made it with about 7 seconds to spare. Heh.
This’ll be short, but Eat Our Brains has been Looking At Me, Ma! So I’d better give it just a dab of attention.
I dipped my toe into twittering the other day, and had an epiphany. I think I figured out one reason Twitter is way cooler than it seems at first glance.
As most folks know by now, Twitter is a sort of web-based IM’ing thing. You sign up, and you type in what you are doing, whenever you feel like it. You can only type in a certain number of characters (120? something like that). At first read, it seems no different than some form of instant messaging, but it’s more than that. It creates community spaces. It’s transformative. Because of its simplicity and accessibility.
You can tap in by web or by mobile phone and follow a person’s activities. Other people follow your activities. It creates this fluid, shifting web of connectivity. It really feels very river-like. Because the messages are so short, it is easy to just slip into the stream of words, go for a swim, and slip back out again. It feels… seamless.
Here’s something else, though. I am an introvert. I need lots of islands of quiet space and room for reflection in my life. And with all my commitments, adding another way to connect exerts a limited pull, despite the fact that Twitter definitely has some fascinating elements.
The web is all about connectivity and community. But I sometimes wish that more tools were built for us introverts…
Still, I may do more investigation of Twitter. I find how it works interesting, from a sociological perspective.
As all tech-savvy Brainiacs know the Phoenix Mars Lander gave up the ghost November 2, making its last transmission. The mission controllers SAY it was the dropping temperatures but I know better…
These are the states I’ve visited in my life. (That I remember–as a child my military family moved a lot so it could be more.) I guess we know who to blame global warming on.
Looking for something good to read? A screenplay by Ursula K. Leguin, maybe? Novels by Brenda Clough, Susan Wright or Vonda McIntyre? Or maybe a handful of short stories to while away that wait for your much-delayed flight home from Kathmandu (now that we can look forward to a new and different president)?
Check out Book View Cafe, a nifty new website featuring work by over two dozen women writers working in SF, horror, fantasy, YA, and related genres. We (disclosure: yes, I’m one of the roster) have banded together to make the site a place where we can bring our out-of-print work back, republish short stories, and show off new and experimental fiction. Much of the work is free; there will be some available for subscription, and some for a nominal fee. Read on screen, or download a PDF to your computer to take elsewhere. And right now, since we’re in the roll-out phase, everything is free free free!
There’s also the Book View Cafe blog, with brief posts on divers topics by BVC authors. I know, another damned blog. But there’s stuff in there runs the gamut from comics to Camelot. You know you’re curious.
I don’t know if Book View Cafe is an entirely new publishing paradigm, as the big kids say, but it’s at least on the leading edge. And there’s really good stuff in there. Come check us out!
Thought the first: Apropos Obama and change. He’s getting flak for choosing experienced politicians to flesh out his administration. For instance, in the NYTimes today, in an article regarding his meeting with Clinton to discuss her taking the Secretary of State role:
… there are clear dangers for Mr. Obama as well … her appointment could undercut his argument that he is bringing true change to Washington.
I get why people are concerned that choosing Washington insiders might undercut Obama’s message. We’re all sick to death of the secret memos, the corruption, and the spinelessness we’ve seen over the past eight years. But change is not simply about the people. It’s about the process. Obama’s message was that he wanted to change the way politics is played in Washington. Reaching out to former rivals in substantive ways is, guess what; a change! And using people who have experience in getting things done when the country is in this current state of crisis seems like a wise move to me…. As long as he combines this reaching out with a willingness to hold the criminals accountable.
The Second Amendment was clearly intended to protect from seizure the tools the citizenry need to defend themselves from tyranny. Muskets and bullets were the tool of choice back then, but it’s quite clear that the underlying intent was to uphold ordinary people’s ability to defend themselves from a government gone wrong.
In a very real sense, the right to privacy and a free internet is the new “right of people to bear arms.” Even the expression “forewarned is forearmed” gives this notion a nod. Access to information is the new equalizer. There may be no way an ordinary citizen, even armed with an uzi, can stand against the assembled might of the US government, as our founders intended, should our government fail in its duty to not abuse its authority. But we can keep them honest, with access to information and the right to protect our personal information from unreasonable search and seizure.
The struggle against tyranny has graduated from bullets to bits.
As you may or may not have noticed, we’ve been having a fair amount of comment spam get through the filters lately. I’ve killed them as quickly as I can, and I suspect that Steve has done likewise.
I find it annoying, as I got spoiled at how good our filters have been until recently. Something seems a little off-kilter, as, additionally, a few comments that shouldn’t have gotten filtered have turned up in moderation.
If there’s a delay on one of your comments appearing, you might want to make sure that it doesn’t have more than one URL in it and that your return email address is either blank, or not ‘fishy-looking’, whatever that might be. You might want to also leave the field for your website’s URL blank.
For what it’s worth, we generally don’t hold or delete comments unless we find them to be obvious boilerplate or the most crude of trolling. Simply disagreeing with somebody generally won’t get you filtered out or deleted, unless you engage in less-than-entertaining ad hominem attacks, or you deliberately try to piss Caroline off and fail to do so.
If I seem a touch distracted these days I’ve got an actual reason. I’m looking for a job. That’s right. In this economy. But income from writing has been, um, erratic lately, at a time when steady and predictable would be the preferred thing. But I’m not here to today to talk about the vicissitudes of the auctorial lifestyle (hey, prospective employers, see how I toss those big words around?). I am here to talk about How Jobsearching Has Changed.
The first time I looked for a job I was a wee-tiny Madeleine, living in Cambridge, Mass. with a former college roommate, in an economy we thought was pretty piss poor. Hah! Those carefree, giddy days when I was poor, unfettered, unmortgaged, and you got a job by looking through the paper, going to the HR departments at local universities, and taking typing tests. It took me two and a half months but I found a job I loved, running continuing ed and summer programs at a university (of which Cambridge has a bunch–you may have heard of some of them). Even eleven years ago, when I was downsized out of my job editing comics, it was essentially the same procedure: answer ads, sign up with employment companies that advertise as loss leaders (Oh, y’know, that job isn’t available anymore, but we have this terrific opportunity making angels dance on pins that would be a great match with your skills!), network (what used to be called “asking around”).
Not so much any more. Yes, the papers have classified sections, but those are often for the kind of jobs I can’t afford to take (or for jobs that are so stratospherically out of my league that they must be advertised broadly so that the search committees can be sure they’ve done their due dilligence). Now it’s online. UCSF and UC Berkeley and SF State have websites where you upload your resume and cover letter, establish a “profile,” and apply to whatever jobs take your fancy. You can get them to send each week’s new listings so you can keep shooting off that profile to them. Of course, there’s an unnerving sense of casting your bread the void; at least with a paper resume and envelope someone had to open the envelope. No, on second thought, maybe they just dumped ‘em into the trash can. So this might be just as good, or better.
Then there’s networking. I suck at networking because I was badly raised. “Don’t put yourself forward, don’t be beholden to anyone, you should do it all on your own, no one wants to help you.” But now, through the miracle of LinkedIn, I have millions of contacts: people from jobs I’ve held, schools I’ve attended, organizations I’ve belonged to. I’ve been recommended by people I’ve worked with. People on Facebook suggest things. People on my Livejournal email me with possible work.
Nothing has panned out yet, of course. Job hunting takes time. Avocado, who has no memory of me with a full-time job, keeps saying “when are you going to get a job?” as if I had some control over the process. What I keep telling her is that it’s like taking a car trip somewhere you haven’t been before: you know you’ll get there, but you don’t have familiar landmarks to tell you how soon you’ll reach the destination. You just keep driving.
Taxpayer: Excuse me, my government, but I was laid off months ago and I haven’t been able to find work and my savings are gone and you’ve cut my unemployment benefits and my family is getting hungry. How about a hand here?
Government: If we gave the money to you it would be socialism. We will now give millions of dollars to the industry that laid you off. It will trickle down.
Taxpayer: Uh, that industry took your money and distributed it to its executive golden parachute program with a little bit for its shareholders, then relocated overseas to avoid paying US taxes.
Government: It’ll work out.
Giving millions to the rich who keep on being rich: Supply-Side Economics
Giving anything to the poor and middle-class who’ve been pillaged by the rich: Socialism
November 30th, 2008 by 
Rory Harper
9 Comments »
Two Headed Baby played a special gig last weekend.
