et in Arcadia egoboo

Minicon

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 02:52:48 GMT

yay!

Danger, Will Robinson! (was: for my Angophilic friends)

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 04:41:35 GMT

Trigger Warning for Oooh! Shiny!!

The delightful Strange Maps just pointed me to a Brit Lit Map . . . which turns out to be a poster available from a high-grade threat to one's budget called The Literary Gift Company. I especially encourage people not to look at the mugs. Or the earrings. For heaven's sake, not the book bags.
“Quotable Chocolate Bars”? all is lost

props!

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:05:37 GMT

Whitney Houston visits Lemont's dream

a discomfiting realization

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:55:54 GMT

I got to ConFusion. I thought I could afford it, and ended up on the cheap thanks to Matt Duhan for the ride AND turning up a guy who wanted half a room, so I only ended up paying for one room night. And the Registration desk did a reasonable job of digging out the name of a Fan GoH whom no one there had ever seen.
Cleavage is in fashion [good]; perv is in fashion [meh]; screaming drunks are WAY too in fashion [double-plus ungood].
I ended up MC'ing the Fan GoH introduction and induction, and that went well. (i.e., no one wrestled me to the ground to get the figurative microphone away from me.) The list is so long it ran a little overtime, but that was no surprise, and it segued into the scheduled memorial for Mike Glicksohn . . . and Rusty Hevelin, and Elessar Tetramariner . . . and the late addition of Bob "Mr. Moose" Lovell.
There seemed to be more programming about anime and cartooning than any one other thing. There wasn't a single thing I wanted to get to. I came up with a new metaphor. One-time sidelights like filk or anime or costuming have spun themselves off with their own con circuits, celebrities and so forth . . . It's like Gordy Dickson's Splinter Cultures. They're really only fragments of the rounded fannish world.

So I did a little mental arithmetic. The first ConFusion is almost precisely as long ago now as the first Worldcon was at the first ConFusion.

R.I.P. Václav Havel

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 08:48:17 GMT

Note for those born less than fifty years ago — In “The Sixties”, one of the great arguments was between the Politicals and the Life-Stylers, whether to smash the system or simply to walk away from it
In 1968, there was this Bohemian writer visiting New York. Not bohemian as in chosen lifestyle, but from Bohemia.
When he went home, he brought a stack of the latest records, groups like The Velvet Underground and The Mothers of Invention.
Then the Russian tanks rolled in . . .
Not long after, some eccentrics decided to become a rock and roll band. (talk about timing!) Being influenced by those very records, they named themselves The Plastic People of the Universe. Their performances were genuine underground events, in abandoned factories and the like.
In time, of course, a couple of them were sent to prison. East Europe taking its artists much more seriously than "America" does, there was agitation to let them out. Eventually, the efforts succeeded, and then the people involved said to themselves, now what? And originated "Charter 77", the premier human rights organization of East Europe in the'80's.
Then came the Velvet Revolution. The (then) Czechoslovakians were very proud that not a single life was lost in their ridding themselves of the Russians. That same writer wrote the Russians politely asking them to leave, and they did!! So he was elected President.
Václav Havel made Frank Zappa "Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture and Tourism", and when he visited the United States as the first freely elected President of Czechoslovakia in half a century, he kept a day open in his schedule to hang with Lou Reed.

So it was Frank Zappa and Lou Reed who overthrew of “Communism” after all.

a thought, leading to a question

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 20:00:15 GMT

My sexual self-image is "vanilla het", which leaves quite a wide gap between what I'm inclined toward and what I might object to. I've never made a systematic survey, but I have friends and acquaintances of a wide range of preferences/tastes.

Famously, there are categories of situation where prior negotiation is a Best Practice. It occurred to me that the more unusual a preference, the more negotiation. So, roughly, the odder the taste (statistically), the more exactly the person knows what they've gotten themselves in for . . .
So the further out of the statistical mainstream, the fuller and more explicit the discussion, and the less the surprising incompatibilities or expectations.

Is that a rough rule of thumb? Is it something well-known other places, and I'm re-inventing a ~~wheel~~ ~~rack~~ Procrustean bed?

If the second time is farce, I must have missed the first time

Tue, 03 May 2011 05:35:30 GMT

When I ran into the first-hand twitter account of the raid that took out Osama bin Laden, I figured it was a cute joke and moved on. It seems it’s real.
Now, the news (BBC via NPR) mentions that the guy selling American flags at Ground Zero for $25 was an Afghan refugee.
God Bless America. I wish I knew what tone of voice to use for that.

#SNOMG (should have been Happy Ground Hog's Day)

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:05:33 GMT

This post has been composed and sitting in my memory for a couple of weeks. I'm doing ok this winter, not extra depressed enough to notice, but I checked the excessively finicky sunrise-sunset-day length website in my bookmarks, and between February 1 and February 28, daylight increases by 70 minutes. Over an hour.
So I was all set to say, We've made it through the dark. The cold isn't over yet, but we have made it through the dark.

Which is still true, though the context has changed.
Chicago has mostly come out ahead on climate change. It got cold earlier than usual this year, but aside from that, the winter has not been remarkable to natives.
Until yesterday, of course. It's unusual to hear thunder in a blizzard. Chicago's max snow seems to be a little more than 20″. This one just edged out the previous third place ever by less than an inch.

The not-downside was a full two days warning. The difference it makes is enormous. The real downside was the wind. Tuesday evening, I was worried about stepping onto a patch of ice on the sidewalk, and sailing away. At least one person seems to have been blown into the lake, though what he was doing out there close enough for it to happen I co not know.

. . . and the radio just said "6°".

best meme yet today

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:13:10 GMT

nominate The Ray Bradbury Tribute for Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form Hugo!

Lake District, North West England

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 23:57:46 GMT

From NASA's Earth Observatory Image of the Day page. I know at least a few people who will enjoy this, and some of them will see it here, so this is intended to propagate it.
. . . I need a good little word for something like "narrowcast meme" or "viral in a narrow target demographic". That's one of the things I seem to use lj&fb for the most.

What a fucking disaster

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 14:23:18 GMT

The next time a member of the Obama glee club tries to tell me he isn't a moderate Republican and he's done wonderful things, I'm going to projectile vomit.

For two years, I've tried to explain that he has the opportunity to damage which is beyond the reach of the Republican party. He was elected, in part, by mobilizing demographics who had never been involved because they didn't see any point. Now he's convincing them they were right in the first place . . .

Why hasn't "the media" mentioned that the governors and state legislatures we have now, after this election, are the ones who will gerrymander the House for the next decade?

I need a widget . . .

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 16:01:39 GMT

A bit of background – I stayed well clear of TGWKotY (The Great Wiscon Kerfluffle of the Year) because it was obvious that there would be excessive projectile endocrine secretion. Pretty obviously, too, however it was finally handled, good people would be very unhappy with the result.
So at this point I finally see an opportunity to attempt something which may be constructive, which is to encourage the disappointed (or worse) not to skip Wiscon.
Anyway, going ankle-deep into the waves of counter^n-comments, I have already identified a couple of voices I want nothing to do with.
Is there some sort of filter so I can just keep their comment-threads from displaying at all?

I'd really like that!

"Fats with Tatts!"

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:01:03 GMT

"Hi all! I am doing a paper about fat chicks (which includes anyone who identifies as female in any way) with tattoos and I was wondering if anyone here would be interested in answering a few questions via email about their ink. I know lots of you have some pretty amazing tatts and I would love to hear about them. So whether you have one tatt or a hundred (or somewhere inbetween), if you are interested in participating, could you drop me a line at bri @ fatlotofgood.org.au

cheers!"

cross-posted with permission

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:20:57 GMT

It so happens I'm vanilla het. It's not a situation I have any responsibility for, since I was simply born that way. Nor is it a condition which has been problematic. It's not really like anybody much cares. ([I'm male.] The occasional advances I've made toward women who weren't interested in men are outnumbered by the advances I've made toward women who weren't interested in me, and the very few homosexual advances I've ever received took polite nos.)

So I really wasn't sure what I had to offer for "coming out day".
But I guess it's my wish that everyone be in the same situation with the nature with which they find themselves.

Saturday on Devon

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 05:32:43 GMT

I was chided by a friend for posting so little here. How can she have any idea what's going on in my life?

Mostly what's going on is not much. A lot of treading water and just barely making the rent. Nothing interesting or not depressing.

But here's my afternoon today anyway.

Most Saturday mornings I go to Rabbi Schaalman's study group, and for an hour and a half, we discuss part of the week's Torah portion. He's a genuine living treasure, and we pray he (and his wife!) lives to 120.

I decided to have lunch on Devon. That's the big Indo-Pak neighborhood, and there's a stretch of most of a mile which is restaurants, sari stores, electronics stores, jewelers, and groceries. It's a local landmark.
I'd forgotten it's Ramadan. I've never seen the street so relatively deserted in daylight. Many of the restaurants were simply closed; several had notices of Koran readings at 1 or 2:30 am . . .
Fortunately, my favorite place was open, and I enjoyed lunch, and the Jack Vance I had taken with.
I stopped in one of the big groceries to do some pricing, too. I ought to cook more, but I don't know how expensive it's going to be to re-start a decent spice collection. To my relief, there seems to be s standard size container of 400 grams, in addition to all the kilos I won't live long enough to use up. And the prices are an order of magnitude or more better than the supermarket prices, though that's expected.
I checked the yogurt as I went by its case. Yogurt and granola is one of my staples. I mix cheap granola with trail mix -- ”granola helper“ -- but there is an odd conviction in the American food industry that Americans cannot abide yogurt with the texture of yogurt. It is a struggle to find yogurt without pectin, agar, tapioca, modified food starch, or other "stabilizers". The yogurt in the Indian grocery was just yogurt, and reasonably priced, so I picked one up. They also had an extra large size (5 pounds, iirc).
Then, in the produce section, there were cherries. I watch the summer fruit closely, and there haven't been cherries in several weeks. I thought they were done. And these were pretty ripe. I don't much like unripe cherries. I couldn't find the sign with their price, but decided to get a bag regardless. At checkout, they turned out to be $2/lb.! That's better than any supermarket sale price this summer.
So I'll be back.

I'm well-versed in the idiosyncracies of the various bus lines, and one of the useful peculiarities I can't account for is that one of the northbound busses there (the 93 California, if you're local) goes up into downtown Evanston, by far the most convenient way to start home.
And it goes past the little Sprint store in Evanston. I'm stuck with cable from Comcast (if we could harness the suckiness of Comcast, there would have been no problem with the Gulf leak; just plug it in), and cell from Verizon. The last time I got a new phone from Verizon, I was boggled to find that it did LESS than the one two years older -- because they'd crippled the software further. I can't back up my phone. And no Verizon employee knows what a backup is. That's carrying hiring the handicapped too far. "Oh, let me install the app so you can connect to the web site!" OK, *you* have a backup of my phone numbers, but *I* don't. "You can print it out!" The phone doesn't read printouts. "You can export it into three different uneditable file formats!" uh huh. "You can edit your numbers on the web site!" It's a flash app. There's a reason that real programmers get hives when flash comes up.
So I'm shopping for my next provider. I want a USB internet antenna and probably a 4G GSM Android phone. The few spavined data plans Sprint offers are utterly inadequate, and they only connect to phones they've sold you.
So that's another brand off my list.

When I got home, my backups had all finished, so now I'm thoroughly redundantized, unless the building burns down.
The drive in my laptop (main machine) crashed a few weeks ago, and it's been ugly, even though almost everything was recoverable. I ordered two large drives and an enclosure to get ahead of it all (I've recently started torrenting, and that can eat the gigs!). And the enclosure was DOA. So I returned it for a better model, which got here a couple of days ago. Everything went together with no problems, and I've been backing and copying enormously.

And on to my Saturday evening radio programs . . .

"magical realism"

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:16:36 GMT

I just had the pleasure of seeing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again at the Film Center.
And it got me to thinking. While this one is head and shoulders above most of them, it is in a sizable and well-known category/genre of movie, which uses exaggerations of genuine folkloric/mythic material.
So, are these Chinese movies with masters with incredible powers "magical realism" or anything close? We don't believe people can "really" do exactly those things, but the incredible feats and capabilities are extrapolated from real beliefs. Maybe a little like a European movie about an alchemist who really can turn lead into gold.
(Am I at least close to something here?)

bloody hands buying forgiveness

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 04:24:03 GMT

I have a form cover letter I insert the address and date into whenever I write a donation check. It says, emphatically, do not send me any junk mail or solicitations. This is a donation, not a membership, so do not send me any "membership renewal" notices, either. Real news is all I want to hear.
As you'd expect, it's effectiveness in uneven. I haven't sent Greenpeace money in years, but still get regular junk mail. Until today, they were the top of my junk mail shit list.
Now I find out that a major owner of Massey Energy, the vampire coal company, sits on the Board of Trustees of both the Environmental Defense Fund and its Action Fund.

The most charitable explanation I can think of is misfeasance, but global warming will be definitively debunked before the EDF is back on my donations list!

(mood: furious)

squick

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:26:14 GMT

I just ran into a reference to a con-like event at the end of June in the northern suburbs. I was a little concerned because I'm not comfortable with something so close (in several ways) not hitting my radar until it's almost here. So I went to the web site . . .

$260.00 Package Includes:

- 3 Day Pass
- Two $30 Photo Ops.
- Two $25 Autographed Photos
- Best Seats at all Q&A's
- Express Photos & Autographs
- Limited Edition Con Pin
- Admission to the Browncoat Bash
- Admission to the Imperial Ball
- Surprise Extras!

80 TICKETS LEFT

eeeww!! Now I don't feel bad about not having been plugged in to whatever grapevines this is circulating through. The very first question in the "FAQ" is:

What kind of merchandise will be available at C-----?

You name it! Collectible toys, comics, tee shirts, music, role playing game supplies, costuming supplies and patterns, replica weapons, horror items and more!

Jay's Grave

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 02:26:10 GMT

I undoubtedly know people who want to know about this, if they don't yet, but I'm not sure exactly who. (whom?)
So I offer this for circulation to Anglophiles and collectors of real-life curiosities, perhaps for recycling the tales.
For Kitty Jay
(Incidentally, this is from one the very best blog I've found for interesting news about understanding what it is that goes on between our ears.)

Happy Birthday, Olivia!

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:36:18 GMT

Olivia is my niece, my brother's daughter. She just had a birthday.
I was thinking about what to give her for her birthday, and the Chicago Nerd Social Club announced a Robot City Workshop. I called my brother, and asked what Olivia is into lately, because who can keep up. The very first thinkg he said was, "electronics?"
SO! This Sunday, Olivia and I are going to Robot City where, as her birthday present, she will build her very own robot.

more of the same about Avatar

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:08:41 GMT

It's a good thing I was warned about how awful the move is, or I wouldn't have been able to sit through as much of it as I was.
Most of my real-time critical reactions were comparisons with other inexcusable works. Silent Running and Rendezvous with Rama had terrific settings in which to put a story; I wish someone had. Starship Troopers is another where they spent so much on the special effects that they only had 75¢ left for the script.
Despite all the handicapping I tried to give it, it terminally jumped the shark for me when the princess, besides having fashionable braided hair extenders, and weird aboriginal crap always covering her tits, had EAR PLUGS. The Matrix is one of my benchmarks of the despising sense of sci fi. Hundreds of years from now, the coolest people in the world will look like the hipster wannabes wished they looked like six months ago. If we could harness the energy in the rising of the gorge, it would ease the energy deficit.
And for the last gag-me-with-an-impossible-ecology-topography-geology straw, everybody's touch-feely tendrils are interchangeable!?!? The entire biosphere has a single standardized interface?!?! I haven't been so revolted since (is it Ammonite I'm thinking of?) the acclaimed how does-the-lost-colony-of-women-reproduce novel finally reveals - - - they gaze soulfully into each others' eyes.
I gave up when the bulldozers hit the albino willow with all the mama juju.
I'm out of exclamation points.

Oh, yeah, the stuff that wasn't wildly overdone had a lot of pretty.

wishing each and all a better year

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:36:29 GMT

(a lot of us can't take too many more like the last one.)
I'm strongly inclined to go with the vernacularists and greet the new year as the beginning of a new decade. Heaven knows we can use one!

ever-evolving spam

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:00:14 GMT

I just received "Subject: Dating 101: Dealing With the Race Factor".

The spam itself is boringly the same, but the header definitely caught my eye. (Not in tyhe way intended.)

Rothbury -- summary

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:22:10 GMT

Last spring there began to be serious advertising for a rock festival in Rothbury, Michigan. That's up the other side of the lake (beyond Saugatuck, if you know the general area). The headliners were to be The Dead, Dylan, String Cheese Incident, and Willy Nelson, with a page-long list of more, from King Sunny Ade to Ani DiFranco to Toots and the Maytalls.
WOW!!
The tickets were $250, to set up a tent next to your car, with more luxurious packages priced in line . . .
WOW!!
Ah, but the fine print giveth and the fine print taketh away. They were recruiting for at least two pools of warm bodies, one to sort garbage on the Green Team, and one to be generally necessary all over the place. Work three six-hour shifts, and your ticket is free.
WOW!!

So I have a narrative of the long weekend to do, including getting there and back, and a variety of notes on current pop culture(s).

King Sunny Ade: Finally got to see him live. Way fun. solid
Femi Kuti & the Positive Force: Perhaps the least exciting act I caught, but that's only me.
Flogging Molly: They kick names and take butt.
String Cheese Incident: One of the most important appearances of the show, since they haven't been playing lately. They have an enormous, fun following, but they just don't do it for me. I do not mean to insinuate they're bad, but for me, personally, there just isn't that much excitement.
Zappa Plays Zappa: Dweezil does do an excellent job of reproducing his father's complicated music, but, again just personally, it was like the best cover band in the world. It is a great band, all excellent, but I felt really odd about the performance. I wonder if other fans who saw Frank live have similar feelings.
The Dead: It's not quite the same band, it's not quite the same repertoire, and the show isn't organized quite the same way, but it's the real thing. THEY ARE HOT.
I lost most of the second set to my overnight work shift (to be detailed in a future episode), but the very second song was "Eyes of the World", which totally does me, so I was ok. And I did get to see the fireworks, since they were perfectly framed by the entrance to the mess tent where I was doing light cleanup.
The schedule had said 8 - 12. The two sets were 8:30-10:30 and 11-1. When I Googled “"the dead" rothbury setlist” the next morning, there were almost 2,000 hits. It's up to about 4,000 now.
Toots and the Maytalls: He's getting old.
Does every African diasppora group have a couple of women over on one side of the stage being hot? All three I saw at Rothbury did.
Matisyahu: I didn't catch his set, but he was right before Ani DiFranco, so I did run into the Chabadniks who were there harassing unobservant Jews to lay tfillin, just this once, right now.
Willie Nelson and Family: I really enjoyed being able to watch his fingers closely on the jumbotron. He doesn't need me to remind people, hey this guy is good
Ani DiFranco: My own biggest takeaway. I'd never seen her live; I now will at every opportunity. Now I understand how outside boundaries she is. Her lyrics are well within the general area I'd expect from a "singer-songwriter", ranging from purely personal to ragingly political, and she mostly was playing a big acoustic guitar. She leaps and jumps and athleticizes like a big-time rocker, at the same time. Just whatever she likes. A seriously hot performance.
Bob Dylan and His Band: The ruin of a once-lousy voice.
He still puts his old lyrics to completely different arrangements, sometimes. Actually, I could put "still" into most of what one might say.
He was in some sort of black suit and top hat, with his five-piece band in matching white jackets, strongly suggesting a big band.

Little Brother, the play, on in Chicago until July 18

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:36:40 GMT

I just heard about this from today's bOINGbOING, but it opened a week ago.
Is there any word-of-mouth on it?