Best thing ever.

It's kind of gratuitous, and old news, but Neil's throwdown with Colbert makes me happy. So.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/221843/march-16-2009/neil-gaiman

Long Slience

Well, longish, anyway, for the blogosphere.

I've been mourning the passing of Ms. Lucky, and trying to pay more attention to the remaining two cats, and just generally muddling along. I've got about five or six potential blog posts queued up in the back of my brain, but they aren't happening just now. So. Bear with me. They involve dirigibles, desert islands, AIG (how could they not?) and other random shit that's floating around in my brain. And they will come, eventually.

Not tonight, though. This is more just a placeholder, "No, really, I'm still here" post, than it is anything else. But I am still here. I'm just sayin'. Hopefully we'll tack on back to all that this weekend (I'm also working for a living, which is time-consuming and which often sucks). Who knows, there may even be writing afoot...not that I'm being terribly good with that these days, but the Emilyon is doing her best to support and goad me in that, which is enormously appreciated.

Anyway. More on this as it develops. Which makes a nice throwaway line, if nothing else. Cheers.

Rest in Peace, Lucky the Little Black Cat.

Sadly, my littlest little one didn't have it in her to overcome her ailment. She died in my arms at the vet's at about 5:55 this evening. She wasn't getting any better, and when I got there she seemed like she was pretty much done. I am very sad, but putting her to sleep was the right thing, I think. She's in a better place now, I hope...one where her legs work again, and there are fields of catnip and plentiful small rodents that are easy to catch and good to eat, and about a zillion secondhand couches lying around so that she can pee wherever she pleases and not get yelled at.

Rest in peace, little one. You will be missed.

Lucky Reynen Pinney

July 2005-March 4, 2009

Light a Candle for Lucky, the Little Black Cat

So one of my little ones is ailing. I got a phone call yesterday afternoon from my roommate, who had come home to find Lucky dragging herself around the apartment with her front paws, because apparently her back legs had ceased to function. I left work and took her to the vet, who diagnosed her with a blood clot that was obstructing the flow of blood to her lower extremities. It turns out that this is not terribly uncommon with cats of her age and lineage--it is a consequence of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is a sort of congenital circulatory disorder. It's the sort of thing they can try and treat, but there's not a great deal that can be done with any certainty.

So she's been at the pet hospital since yesterday, and they're pumping her full of fluids and pain meds and stuff that they hope will dissolve the blood clot, but while she's shown some slight signs of improvement, she still has not regained the use of her back legs. The vet told me this afternoon that if this state of affairs doesn't improve by tomorrow, I should seriously consider putting Lucky to sleep. And sadly, I am. All I can really do right now is hope that things improve for the better between now and tomorrow.

So please, one and all, light a candle and think good thoughts at Lucky, the little black cat. She's a sweetheart, and she's only three and a half years old, and I'm not really ready to say goodbye to her yet. All good wishes will be greatly, greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Alternate History/Weird Science

So the apparently lengthy research/learning curve process proceeds apace for the "Percival Lowell Goes to Mars" story. It's an interesting process, and an instructive one...I've never tried to conceive of a viable alternate history/alternate science story, and what all seems like it needs to go into the preparatory research process is interesting, and daunting. First I had to get a sense of the physics and energy requirements of achieving escape velocity from Earth's atmosphere. Then I needed to look into the existing (or almost existing) technology of the time--in this case, the time period between 1900 and 1915 or so. Then I needed to think about other things, like how such a craft might be powered, or propel itself, if it did indeed escape the gravity well and get into interplanetary space. And I needed to consider how things did actually go in history, and look for moments or instances where something might have gone differently, and then begin to postulate the consequences of such a divergence, to see if the posited diversion might be useful to the story I want to tell and and to support the alternate future I want to explore.

One odd consequence of my somewhat random and haphazard research into various things is that I increasingly believe that it was at least technologically possible that we could have launched a viable spacecraft in 1915. The theory and the rudimentary implementation of the necessary technologies was there...nobody was taking the next necessary steps in that research yet, and wouldn't ultimately do so for a number of years, but a whole lot of the shit that might make such an endeavor work was already on the drawing board, at least implicitly.

So then the question becomes, what would have to have happened differently to persuade people--scientists, financiers, etc.--to make it possible for something else to have happened. I've been looking at the beginnings of rocketry theory, Tesla's crazy experiments with electicity and magnetism, Modernist poetry (Amy Lowell, the Imagist poet, was the sister of Percival Lowell, as it turns out), as well as early attempts at viable solar power and Robert Goddard's positing of the viability of ion drives for space travel in the interplanetary vaccuum.

Thing is, the more I look at all these disparate bits, the more I see possibilities regarding how it could have happened differently. Roundabout the time Percival Lowell decided to build his observatory in Flagstaff, Nikolai Tesla moved his center of operations to Colorado Springs--in the American southwest of the 1900's, they were practically neighbors. Tesla was also inspired by Lowell's writings about the canals of Mars to work toward a way of communicating via projected energy with Mars. Likewise, while the Lowell Observatory was under construction in Flagstaff, there was a solar energy concern that sold its first photovoltaic electricity-generating apparatus to someone in Mesa, AZ (which was subsequently destroyed in a windstorm). Most all experimentation into solar power at the time was focused around the discovery that selenium gives off electrons, thus producing electrical energy, when exposed to sunlight, and it turns out that selenium is most easily obtained as a byproduct of copper refining--and Arizona was, and is, one of the biggest producers of copper in the United States. Also, Lowell was of the Boston aristocracy, and one of the early pioneers of rocketry theory was a guy named Goddard, who was very much embedded in the Boston academic/intellectual scene. I'm pretty sure that Lowell and Tesla never met, and that Lowell and Goddard never did, and that Tesla and Goddard didn't, but maybe they did, and even if they didn't they could have, had things gone a bit differently.

That seems to me, at present, to be how the alternate history thing has to work. It's like, maybe it didn't happen, but it could have, and if it did how would things be different? And to build the alternate present and future one has to ascertain what could possibly have happened differently, and then think through what the consequences for future time would be had those things actually transpired in a different way. It's a fascinating historical scavenger hunt to try to build a story from those sorts of considerations, and there is a huge learning curve, but it's sort of awesome and a whole lotta fun to try it. I'm also enjoying the way it seems to boil down to issues of plausibility--the more things one finds in the historical record that suggest that, well, it could have happened, the stronger the spine of the mooted story winds up being. So. Good times.

And somewhere in the SF Metro area, Emily J is laughing at me, no doubt, because once again something that seemed at the outset like a more-or-less innocent and manageable story idea has swelled into something that probably could, and maybe should, be a novel.

Tra la. We shall see. In any event, it's good times. And my Percival Lowell books about Mars should probably be arriving in my mailbox sometime this week. Yay.

Keep marching.

I dunno. I suppose that's been my mantra, or my catchphrase, or what have you, for a long time now. Something I told myself, and something I managed to do, even when I didn't want to and even when I didn't believe in it. The notion is, in essence, that if you're in a bad place, and you don't know how to get out of it, just keep moving, keep walking, and eventually you walk your way to a better place. Maybe.

Well, it turns out that the bullshit that I've been telling myself to keep myself getting up out of bed every morning for quite some time turns out not to be bullshit after all. That's kinda cool.

I'm in a Ph.D program now, and it's paid for if I want it (assuming I don't fuck it up in the process of doing it, but I'm reasonably confident that I won't), and so my future is sort of secure for the next few years, at least. That's the best, it seems to me, that one can hope for, and I actually got there. There was a plan, and directed intent, but I am honestly kind of shocked that, even given that, it seems to have worked. But it did, goddamn. Not by some stroke of master strategy or cunning badassness, but by doing the business, showing up, tossing what I have out there into the world to the extent that I've been able on a given day. A repeated and repetitive act of faith, really, in a sense. I've kept marching. And here I am.

Pretty awesome. The next chapter of this particular novel is almost nigh. Yay.

Funded!

Well, the happy news the other week was that I got accepted into a Ph.D program at the University of Southern Mississippi. The happy news tonight is that I came home from work to find that USM had decided to offer me a TA position which will pay for much of my stay there, if that's where I wind up going. So. Yay. BIG yay. Yay. And I get to teach again, beginning in the fall. So once more, yay. Yay yay yay. That's all.

Bad tactics.

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not going well? Gee, go figure.

Lind gets it right again, I think. Tra la.

Obama/Jindal, in brief.

So I was out last night, seeing Sherman Alexie speak truth to vegans and commit completely valid and reasonable rhetorical atrocities on a member of my former graduate program, so I didn't see the Obama speech until I got home tonight.

I dunno. I haven't watched a president talk since something like 2004. I was inclined to be cynical, and to an extent I was, but it was so fucking refreshing to see someone who actually has something of the statesman in him, and who actually thinks and cares about policy and about trying to level with the people who elected him, that I was genuinely moved in places. I even cried. And even when I wasn't, well, it was really good to hear someone saying things that weren't Karl Rove talking points or empty flag-waving pap, cynically delivered. It was also really good to feel like I was being talked to with the assumption that I wasn't stupid, because I'm not. I found the whole thing inspiring, actually, and while I feel weirdly uncomfortable saying so, I am also glad to be able to make myself weirdly uncomfortable by saying it.

And then, of course, there's Bobby Jindal, the Great Brown Hope of the GOP. Wow. What a jackass. If that's all you got, enjoy a decade or three in the political wilderness. I actually had the same response, upon seeing the beginning of that, that Chris Matthews did. After watching the whole twelve minutes or so, I could totally see what Gawker was getting at. Jesus. This guy and Michael Steele? Good luck, you pieces of elephant dung. Gah.

Anyway. That's all. Cheers, and God help us all.

Fun with Orbital Mechanics

On the upside, I have a new story on the brain, and I actually spent a large portion of my hours at work Wiki-ing all that shit. I love it when I get to Wikipedia articles that feature, front and center, a math equation. As the Emilyon put it this afternoon, I don't speak that language.

Happily, however, my downstairs roommate does. He's a physics guy, and so I went downstairs when I finally got home tonight, and picked his brain about viable means of achieving escape velocity in a slightly alternate year in the 1910-1915 range. And he actually explained the shit I'd been reading on Wikipedia in terms that made sense. I sort of get the ion thruster now, and I understand the minimal thrust/high potential energy thing that is sort of encompassed there. And the fact that I can put Percival Lowell, Robert Goddard and Nikola Tesla together in the same historical moment, place and context, makes me very happy. It's gonna be another story that winds up being way too long, and it's one that also has six or seven relatively steep learning curves attached to it, but it's good times. We also chatted about old Apple II games we had known, and Jack McDevitt, and we drank inexpensive beer out of aluminium cans and other good stuff. I love having a goodnatured physics geek living downstairs. Yay.

Gotta get up for work tomorrow, though, and shortly. So that's all for that, right now. The neighbor thought the story had legs, though, which is heartening. So. We shall see, hopefully soonish. Tra la.

One Outta Three Ain't Bad.

Sigh. Got home and checked the mail, and found that University of Kansas said no, too. So no from UIC, no from UK...the two nos being my two top choices. I'm trying not to be too demoralized about that...I got in somewhere, and so I will go somewhere in August, and that's all good. But there is also a certain little bit of "What's wrong with me?" running through my head just now. Of course, there are a lot of valid answers to that particular question, but at the same time not many of those answers should be available to the people judging my Ph.D applications. So it's a bit demoralizing. Still and yet, though, I'm going somewhere, even if it isn't one of the places I really wanted to go. So. Anyway. That's all, with that. Fuck 'em...it's their loss, whether they know it or not. So.

Catching up with the teevee.

Well, I spent the evening catching up with last week's illegally downloaded television, which was relaxing.

Burn Notice was a pleasure, as always. Kind of a nice departure, too, from their usual episode formula.

24 was, as usual, rather disturbing in its endemic contempt for civil liberties, though this season it seems to be trying to tack toward addressing that issue, and the complications of it. Still manages to be terribly addictive, though, simply because of the faux-real-time format. I dunno. I feel dirty watching this every week, and yet I still watch it.

Dollhouse was...mmm. Definitely had a certain Joss Whedon feel that makes me happy, but also felt like it was him trying to make the TV execs happy so that they wouldn't cancel and/or torpedo his new show before it got off the ground. Also kind of cool in that Eliza Dushku will probably get a chance to act a lot more than she did while playing Faith. I loved Faith, don't get me wrong. But still. And that scene toward the end where she's lying down to sleep and a panel slides over so that her sleeping cubicle becomes coffin-like...nice touch. Joss always seems like he runs afoul of TV network execs sooner or later, so I'm not terribly optimistic about this show, but I will keep watching it, I think. And keep my fingers crossed.

Termintator came back last week, too, after an annoying hiatus. Good episode, though the guy they found to play Reese (from the first movie) was kinda lame and he had unfortunate sideburns and facial hair. I sort of wonder if they're ramping up to close the series out, because there's been a death watch out on it since about six episodes into the first season. I hope that Fox makes an emphatic decision, one way or another. I also hope that they decide to keep it going, because I like the show a lot, and I think it does a nice job of maintaining and developing the storyline that the T2 movie laid down. If they don't, though, I don't want the season finale to be one of those half-assed things where it's like "It could be the end of the season, it could be the end of the show. So we're going to give you a cliffhanger that might never get resolved." I fear that they will, however. That would be sad.

BSG. Hmmm. There are only five or so episodes left. I hated the first two, this season. I was sort of okay with the mutiny episodes. I am cautiously optimistic, too, after "No Exit," though Tigh's wife being the uber-Cylon (and even more uber than was hitherto expected) still doesn't work for me particularly, and the structural problems with Galactica totally came out of nowhere. Like nobody ever noticed those cracks in the wall plating before now? C'mon. Anyway. As always, from week to week, I will give it the benefit of the doubt and trust it until next Friday. I dunno. I think it's probably good that it's ending soon, much as I loved it the first couple of seasons. It's telling that I'm not even expecting greatness at this point--I'm just hoping that they retain their dignity, and dot most of the i's and cross most of the t's, as they wind it down. They seem like they're doing that, at least provisionally, so far.

And then there's Chuck. I love Chuck. I root for Chuck. Along with Ash from Evil Dead 3 and Benjamin Braddock from The Graduate, and Tom Regan from Miller's Crossing, I think Chuck Bartowski makes a valuable role model. Of course, he's far younger than I am now, so I wouldn't really consider him as such, but if I were in my early to mid-twenties, I might. In any event, there's interesting things afoot for Chuck, and I do continue to appreciate that there is a constantly developing throughline from episode to episode, despite the fact that the show doesn't rate "serial drama" status. Not sure I like the turn that his relationship with Sarah seems to have taken, but the fact that he now has crazy Fulcrum shit in his head as well as crazy CIA shit is kind of awesome. So.

And yes, for someone who doesn't have a functional television at this point, I do seem to watch a lot of the teevee. I'm honestly not sure how that happened. Ah, well. That's one of the things that the internetz are for. Tra la.

It's the end of the world as we know it.

And here's the somewhat bleak instuctional manual for what we stare down the barrel of, going forward. I'm tired and I'm drunk, so I'll spare you the commentary on this shit at present, because I have a feeling it would be deeply compromised. But anyway...as per "Candide," we must all tend to our gardens. So. Drink up, because the next X years are probably gonna blow. Tra la.

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2009/02/dmitri-orlovs-b.html

Neither rain nor snow nor fog nor the idiocy of California drivers...

...will keep me from my duties at the crystal factory, it seems.

Well, I'm back from my weekend in Los Angeles. The person that I was mainly going to visit intervened, apparently, with the weather gods on Friday, thus saving me from anything but about fifty miles of obnoxious, blatting rain just west of Needles and then some fog that made me tap the brakes to slow down maybe twice as I snaked my way down the Cajon Pass to San Bernardino. For the way home, well...not so much with the intervention. I-15 was actually closed for awhile at the Cajon Pass while I was heading out of LA, where they were also having torrential downpours that were making LA drivers actually go below the speed limit on the freeways. There was intermittent rain all along I-40, as well, and some snow in the heights between Kingman and Seligman. There's actually a winter storm warning in effect for Kingman, but I made good enough time after the Cajon Pass business that I got through all that before the rain actually turned to snow. I got snowed on for maybe about a mile and a half, which I consider a win.

So I dunno. Maybe all that is the intervention of the weather gods...it could conceivably have been far worse than it was. In any event, I am home safe, and sitting in my bar away from home, having a couple of beers before rolling through the last mile or so to my domicile.

It was lovely being away for a few days, and lovely seeing some very dear people who I haven't seen in a long time. I also found myself oddly charmed by Dave Eggers's Time Travel Mart in Echo Park, even though I have something of an aversion to Mr. Eggers himself. My souvenir from the weekend came from there--a 1986-87 State Department report on Soviet propaganda and disinformation operations. Awesome. It is, however, nice to be home, too, and to be home safely, despite all the fucking weather. Tra la. Cheers.

"Dollhouse" tomorrow.

Are you excited? I have to say that I'm kind of excited. Not that I will actually be watching it--I will probably be somewhere just south of Barstow on I-15 when it airs. But the return of Joss Whedon to the teevee makes me happy. Though why he's doing it with Fox (again) causes me some bafflement--they pulled the plug, arguably prematurely, on "Buffy". They shot "Angel" in the head by announcing its cancellation some six episodes before the end of a season that they had led him to believe was the penultimate one. "Firefly"? Don't even get me started. And now they get "Dollhouse". Mmmm.

Still, Joss making teevee again is a happy thing. Go Joss!

Ph.D Land

Well, happy news in the mailbox when I got home today. Like my friend Sacha, I have been formally accepted to the Ph.D/Creative Writing program at the University of Southern Mississippi. So I will not be laboring in the crystal mines this time next year, even if none of my other applications bear fruit. It's sort of astonishing, actually, how much a load that is off my mind. Part of me was sort of dreading starting to receive response letters--"What if they're writing to say no?" and all that--but now it's all good, even if the rest of them do say no. I kind of hope they don't...USM isn't my top choice, and the thought of living in Mississippi scares me somewhat. But getting into a Ph.D program was the next logical step in my diabolical plan for world domination, and that step has now been completed. So. Yay.

I almost typed something about banshee season being kind to me thus far, but then I caught myself because I realized I would be asking for trouble. And February isn't even half over, so the banshees can still be counted upon to put in an appearance. Hee.

Anyway. Cheers, and probably some days of silence, as I'm off after work tomorrow for a weekend in Los Angeles. Woo and hoo.

The news scares me.

So I've been dealing with an acute work-related stupidity disability in recent days, but I suppose that I also haven't been blogging current events too much because it's sort of depressing and/or horrifying to survey said current events. Case in point: I got home tonight, after another stupid day and a somewhat rejuvenating stop at the bar, and for whatever reason I looked in on my Yahoo! mailbox. Here were the news headlines that were thrust at me upon login:

• Bankers vow to build trust with increased lending (AP)
• Big satellites collide 500 miles over Siberia (AP)
• Taxpayers may have to cover octuplet mom's costs (AP)
• Official: Wife pulled $15M before Madoff's arrest (AP)
• 69 computers missing from nuclear weapons lab (AP)

That's not a heartening list. 'Nuff said. I think I'm going to go and hide in Hulu for a little while. Cheers.

Reading.

So I finally seem to be showing signs of recovery from the reading-related burnout that was one of my souvenirs from two years of grad school.

This is a happy thing, but it's taken an awful long time to get here. In addition, I still find myself limited in what I can actually bring myself to read. I read a couple of books while I was at Clarion, and then I think I read maybe one between September and November.

I think maybe what's going on is that I have to work back up to relatively worthwhile fiction. I started with Spenser novels, which are like TV movies on the printed page. I read three of them over the course of a week sometime in December--each one takes maybe three and a half hours, and they are never at all demanding. After that, I took a break for awhile, and then went on a small Elmore Leonard bender after the new year. I also read a charming bit of Michael Lewis business-porn that had been sitting on my shelf, untouched, since I left NYC.

For whatever reason, I've been disinclined to read any SF/F in a long while now. There might be a bit of Clarion hangover as well, I don't know. But I managed to consume David Brin's The Postman (because I was in a post-apocalyptic mood, and, well, it's David Brin and I've never actually read anything from him), which was kind of useless but charmingly so. Unfortunately, the copy I was reading was the movie tie-in edition, so it had Kevin Costner's mug staring meaningfully out past me into the middle distance every time I picked it up. And then, over the weekend, I wasted long and glorious hours with a Harry Harrison sci-fi trilogy from the dawn of the 1980s. It was weirdly satisfying, though frankly it wasn't very good, even for Harry Harrison. It wasn't, for instance, The Stainless Steel Rat.

I dunno, though. I've got a pile of scifi books that I've been really wanting to read, and which are more respectable and demanding (and, to me, of interest) than 80s-era pulp. Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake, Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, Iain Banks' Consider Phlebus, Charlie Stross's The Atrocity Archives. The other week I even found a copy of Matt Ruff's priceless Sewer, Gas and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, which I've been meaning to reread for years. For whatever reason, though, I just can't do it yet. I don't know what's wrong with me, really. I do feel like maybe I'm getting better, though.

So. Soon, perhaps. One can hope.

Not tonight, though, I don't think. I think I'm going to wander downstairs, where my roommate and our downstairs neighbor have announced that there will be movie watching. That's a good thing to do on a snow night. So. That's all. Cheers.

Gotta Love a Snow Day

Well, Flagstaff is a winter wonderland. Which is to say that, on my way home today, I got temporarily stuck twice, and skidded into a right-hand turn that left me with no traction, sliding into the lane where oncoming traffic typically is. Thankfully, not too many people were driving, and none on that particular road at that particular moment. I was only doing 15mph, though...such things should not happen when you're going that slow. I'm just sayin'. Fuckin' winter wonderlands.

Anyway. The happy upshot is that I am home, and hunkered down with a fresh 30-pack of turtle beer, and for the last several hours I've been sitting around drinking beer and doing work that I brought home with me. It's sort of awesome, drinking beer and doing work that one is going to get paid for, at the same time.

And since the snow probably isn't going to let up until sometime tomorrow afternoon, I have arranged with my boss to work from home tomorrow as well, which will be very happy indeed. My Buick is a mighty automobile, but it really, really doesn't like the snow. And while I will probably not sit around and drink beer tomorrow morning as I work from home, it pleases and amuses me that I could if I wanted to. Tra la.

And then there's Kojak.

Yes, I'm winding down my weekend by further indulging my rather unseemly Hulu habit.

Now maybe it's because I grew up in the seventies, and there was a bunch of stuff I wasn't allowed to watch on television in those days, but it makes me enormously happy that some of the true gems of 1970's TV are enshrined at Hulu for all to enjoy and revel in. Like the Rockford Files. Or Kojak.

I've never actually seen an episode of Kojak. I'm in the process of watching the pilot now, and had to stop and blog about it. Partly because Harvey Keitel was apparently a guest star in the first episode. Also because of the kind of amazing graphic design that went into the opening credits. I mean yeah, it looks cheesy as all git-out now, but back in the day, that was cutting edge stuff. And the way the NYC skyline gets rotated and morphed into an extruded rendition of the show title at the end? Dang. You gotta love that shit.

Or maybe you don't. But I do. So. Back I go.

Speaking of opening credits, incidentally, it's worth having a look at the ones for Murder One (which I actually did wind up watching through the entire first season, and it was actually fairly decent), because this was a show created when CGI was first coming of age for network TV, and the credits are like the video graphix equivalent of the [BLINK] tag or the Photoshop "Poster Edge" filter--stuff that looks like fun until you remember that design is supposed to be in the service of the product that the design is supposed to promote, and then you realize that there is nothing in the world that could ever be well-served by that kind of design. So.

Anyway. Back to Kojak. Tra la.