Fragments -- BLAZE O'GLORY

I've been cleaning out my office, and came across a stack of old papers and notes with notes and ideas for and fragments of old stories or movie scripts.

I've mentioned that when I was trying to sell movie scripts in the early 1990's, several actual scripts were "dumbed down" stories that went nowhere when I tried to market them.  Those were the script ideas good enough to actually write.   I had more that never got beyond rough notes or outlines.

This, I think, is the worst of those.

BLAZE O'GLORY

High Concept: Showgirls meet Indiana Jones

• Stripper/dancer Blaze O'Glory becomes privy to vital info.
• The Hero-figure, government agent, arrives, bonds with Blaze, succumbs to surprise attack by gunmen; it's up to Blaze to get the info to safety (with a Yoda-type character).
• Bad guys in pursuit; skin-of-teeth escapes.
• Blaze finds out what the info is: widescale corruption in government, including Hero's own agency; turning over info to hero's agency will only see info used for blackmail/influence. (Does Hero know this?)
• Blaze is now marked for death; she's also pissed off.
• Blaze loses closest friend to killers; even more pissed off.  More chases and escapes.
• Blaze takes info to "radical" alternative paper, but the editor is a burnt-out sell-out, sells info back to government and gives them Blaze's location.
• Showdown with armed agents; Blaze under siege.
• Hero brought from hospital to talk her out -- where are his loyalties?
• Blaze "dies" in final conflagration; info destroyed, no one wins; crippled Hero sent to desk job.
• Finale -- corridor of agency, 2 years later -- Hero sees girl who looks/doesn't look like Blaze -- hair color, glasses, breast reduction? -- turn her in or not? finally gives her leeway -- last scene as she hacks into agency files.

Wow.  That kinda... stinks.  Did I really want to write crappy movies?  No, but there were times when low-budget action thrillers seemed to be the only type of scripts companies were buying from neophyte screenwriters.  Even with my ST:TNG episode as a professional credit, it was hard to get scripts looked at.

Since I didn't go on to turn these notes into an actual script, maybe I did have enough self-respect to not sink that low.

Besides, there's probably a real stripper somewhere named Blaze O'Glory.

(A quick Google search reveals a 1930 movie already had the title BLAZE O'GLORY.  A soldier is placed on trial for murder, interspersed with song and dance numbers.  I'm not making that last part up.  However, the author of the original short story -- "The Long Shot" -- that the movie was based on, Thomas Boyd, appears to have been pretty interesting.  I may see if I can get some of his books thru InterLibrary Loan.)

Blue Mondays

The TNT network has cancelled Monday Mornings, its David E. Kelley-produced medical drama.

I'm sad.  Monday Mornings was, like a lot of Kelley's shows, quirky and funny and dramatic.  (Sometimes over-dramatic.)  And it had both Alfred Molina and Ving Rhames starring in it!  How could it possibly fail?

Maybe because TNT only greenlighted a puny six episodes.  I remember when the minimum order for a tv show would be thirteen episodes.  It never built enough of a following because TNT didn't give it time to build a following.  If you give a show a short season, you have to promote it heavily.  TNT didn't do that either.  The show was sort of like a meteor:  It came, it glowed brilliantly for a few seconds, and then it was gone.

Hopefully even the half-a-sandwich season it had will show up on DVD or Netflix eventually.  Give it a watch if you get a chance.

This & That -- Links, etc.

I'm going to try and make "This & That", briefly noting things of interest I've come across on the Net or elsewhere, a semi-regular feature here.

(photo from townhall.com)

Solar Impulse, the completely-solar-powered plane attempting to cross the United States, landed in Phoenix at the end of the first leg of its trip.  This is cool, even if I couldn't help noting to Hilde that a hundred and ten years ago the Wright brothers leading-edge flying machine looked like something that might come apart in a strong wind, and the leading-edge of aviation technology today still looks like something that might come apart in a strong wind.

I stumbled across a book-review/book-commentary blog with a difference: Notes To My Muses, by mystery author Jane Isenberg.  For her 70th birthday several years ago, Jane decided to start a blog of love letters to some of her favorite authors.  Witty, chatty, and perceptive.  Except for Michael Chabon's alternate-history The Yiddish Policemens' Union and one or two others, not much in the sf/fantasy line; most of the works she writes about are literary or mystery works.  (Another Travis McGee fan, yay!)  I loved her opening remark to John Updike: "I first encountered your work in The New Yorker in the early Sixties, but I got married anyway." 


In a less positive light, B&N's Nook Apps is offering a "game" called PUNCH A NERD!  The object is to "Punch-A-Nerd! Have some fun, punch a nerd and see how far he flies! This light hearted game is FREE and is a fun way to pass the time."  As a long-time nerd whose old school days occasionally featured being punched for, well, being a nerd, that doesn't sound like much fun to me.   (And a Google search reveals there are multiple "Punch A Nerd" games available from different developers.  Wait a minute, aren't programmers supposed to be nerds themselves?  Thanks a lot, you traitors!)



From 2011,  Allan Guthrie's Ten Rules To Write Noir.

Texas Library Will Have No Books.  Cue "Illiterate Texans" joke in three, two, one....   The article says the all-electronic library will look something like an Apple Store.  God, I hope not.  The glass-and-steel-cube style of Apple Stores is cold and offputting.  (I used to do security in an upscale office/shopping development that featured an Apple store.  I have stories....)  A traditional library is more than just checking books in and out; I wonder if there'll be actual librarians on site to assist the public with research and questions?

Word of the Day: Scomm

I've learned a new word: "Scomm". The traditional meaning is "buffoon", which would be useful, but that's not where I saw it, or how it seemed to be used. Over on Yahoo! News, an article on how the dead Boston terrorist's body is still sitting in a funeral home's chiller, unable to find a cemetery willing to accept and bury him, has been producing some of the most vicious and ugly comments I've ever seen.  Considering that "ugly" tends to be the default mode for Yahoo! commenters, that's saying something. Essentially, it's a post-mortem lynch mob there. I posted a comment that this behavior was unseemly and un-American. One reply included the remark "Scomm goes back to scomland."

If the guy replying to me was actually using that in the obscure meaning of "buffoon", I don't think that was accurate. "Buffoon" is not how I would describe someone who killed multiple people, maimed and wounded dozens of others, engaged police in intrense firefights in public streets, managed to get an entire city to shut down for 24 hours (at an estimated minimum economic cost of a quarter-billion dollars), and triggered a national spasm of the ugliest side of Ugly-Americanism since 9/11 (that he's been able to continue even after his death). I would not call that guy a buffoon; I would call him a Very Successful Terrorist.

My responder might have simply been misspelling "scum", rather than using an obscure word. He didn't know how to spell "Christian" properly, either. (Somewhere, some poor guy named Christien is having the nagging feeling that people are saying nasty remarks about him on the Internet.)

But "scomm", that's a useful word. I'll remember it.

My Grumpy Afternoon

Hilde and I went to Best Buy yesterday afternoon.  Best Buy is one of those stores that keep showing up on lists of "Major Chains That Will Probably Go Out of Business Soon."  I used to shop there fairly often, but their selection isn't as good as it used to be and their customer service likewise has gone downhill.

But we needed to go there, because  we were shopping for an e-reader, specifically an Amazon Kindle.

I don't like to shop with Amazon. I don't like their predatory business practices or their monopolistic aspirations.  I don't like that they saddled the Kindle with a proprietary format.  But we're trying to find an ebook reader that Hilde can use and the Kindle appeared to be the only one on the market with a "Voice Command" capability.

Hilde's had severe rheumatoid arthritis for forty-five years.  Besides the damage to the rest of her body; her hands and fingers have grown twisted and weak.  On top of that, over the last ten or so years she's developed a bad "essential tremor" in her hands and forearms, a shaking that can get so extreme I've seen her shake a soda straw out of a water bottle. She has, on a good day, maybe 5% of a normal person's use of her hands.  She can't use a keyboard, or a touch pad, or a mouse.  (Ever wondered why I show up on the Internet so much, but she doesn't at all?  That's why.)

She's able to turn pages in a book, sometimes using the edge of her palm, but even that's growing more difficult for her. 

Eventually, Hilde won't even be able to turn pages in a book by herself.  So we've been trying to find if there's an e-reader on the market that will turn pages and other tasks by voice commands.  And the Kindle seemed to be the only one with any kind of "Voice Command" listed as a feature.

But I couldn't find much actual information online about the Kindle's Voice Command, so I wanted to try it out before we spent the money on it.  And Best Buy appeared to be the only place where one could actually handle and try out a Kindle before buying.

I'd come across some online accounts of people who'd gone to Best Buy back around 2011 to do a hands-on with the Kindles there, only to find that the display models were all locked in demonstration mode, with only limited functions available.  Since that's friggin' stupid, I figured Best Buy might have freed up the Kindles' functions by now.  So I called up the closest Best Buy and asked.

"Are your Kindles locked in demonstration mode?"
"No, they're not."

You know how this story's going to end, don't you?  Not quite yet, though.  Because when we went to the closest Best Buy, their wi-fi network wasn't working.  (An electronics store that can't keep a wi-fi network up and operating.  Ponder that thought for a moment.)  And they said the Kindle needed wi-fi to use the Voice Commands. 

Wait, what?  There aren't any printed circuits between the microphone and the processor chip?  It has to broadcast your voice an entire inch or two to the rest of the machine?

Years ago, I came up with Geek Rule #1: Whatever can be done with a computer, must be done with a computer.   I think the 2013 version may be: Whatever can be done via wi-fi, must be done via wi-fi.

So, no Kindle try-out there.  Back in the car and off to the second closest Best Buy.  And of course you know what we were told there:

"All our Kindles are locked in demonstration mode, so we can't show you that feature."

That was a waste of about an hour and a half and a gallon of gas.  Frustrating.

If a customer calls with a question you don't know the answer to, answering "I don't know" is acceptable customer service.  Answering "I don't know, may I put you on hold while I get someone who does?" is even more acceptable.  Making Shit Up off the top of your head is NOT acceptable customer service.

No wonder Best Buy is going down the tubes.  I'd thought about shopping there for a new keyboard after looking at the Kindle, but after hearing the Kindle's were locked in demo after all, we left without looking at anything else.

To top it off, after getting home, I did some more searching online and finally found a better description of what the Kindle's Voice Commands actually does:  It takes the command options off various menus and reads them out loud to you.  It's actually an accessibility feature for visually-impaired or blind users, not for people with impaired dexterity or unable to use their hands at all.

So there don't seem to be any hands-free options available for e-readers.   I find that not only frustrating, but perplexing.  I can tell my smartphone to make a phone call; I can tell it to make a Google search.  But I can't tell my e-book apps to "Turn Page" or "Go Back" or "Go To [page ___, or Chapter ___ ]".  The closest thing I found was an app for people with reading-comprehension problems that highlights a few lines at a time and moves the highlighted area slowly down the pages; but that's still not voice-operated, you just start it with a button push and stop it with another.

I would think there'd be a market for a hands-free e-reader, and not just for people with disabilities.  Cookbooks, craft instructions (knitting patterns?), car repair manuals, other activities where your hands are in use and/or greasy or soiled; a hands-free option would be great for those kinds of books.

What?  "There's always Dragon," I hear someone saying.  The only online article  I could find about trying to do that with a Kindle is this one from all the way back in 2009, and it still requires being able to use the mouse a lot.  I couldn't find anything that said you could use Dragon with a Nook, and several spots that said you couldn't.  And Hilde's tried to use Dragon before, and found the learning curve dreadfully frustrating and steep.  (She may give it another try, after some dental implants are completed at the end of this month and her regular speaking mannerisms are back.)

In the meantime, it looks like we wait until someone comes out with an actual hands-free reader.  *grump*

Old Stories

[long post warning]

As reported previously, I seem to have started writing fiction again -- completed fiction! -- in recent months, after a long dry spell since 2006.  Besides wanting to send those new stories out to markets, I thought some of the old unsold stories might be worth trying again as well.

So I spent a couple of hours the other night consolidating all my old story manuscripts into one location.  They were scattered over several old computers and a small stack of diskettes.   They now reside on a key drive; I'll get the files copied over into my current computer, then copy again onto a second key drive that will go into the safe-deposit box at the bank.  (Should I go to Google Docs and store them on the cloud as well?  I'll think about that.)

Yeah, yeah, this is all stuff I should have done years ago. 

I had a short period of distress when I couldn't find the diskette that contained the majority of the short stories.  All I found was a diskette labelled with the title of one story, "The Spearsister".  I thought I might end up having to retype almost everything into the computer.  (Whenever I finish a story, I print out a hardcopy and put it in a file cabinet.  I'm not totally irresponsible.)

But when I put that single diskette in the old drive, all the missing stories were included on it.  *whew*  (The one story that wasn't on that diskette?  "The Spearsister")



Ye Olde Mitac, RIP

I also found out that my 20-year-old old brick-shaped/brick-weight Mitac laptop (with a mind-boggling forty megabytes of memory!  Whoo-hoo!), the machine I wrote a lot of my fiction and scripts on when I was more prolific, would no longer power up.  (It still turned on as of a few years ago.)  Anyone need a doorstop?

Speaking of scripts: After selling the "Clues" script to ST:TNG in 1990, I tried to follow up on that success by writing and trying to sell movie scripts.  (Why not try for a television career?  Because it's almost mandatory to live in the LA area if you're a TV writer; giving up the security--  and health insurance-- of my Postal Service job and jumping naked into the shark-infested waters of freelance scriptwriting was too big a risk, even if Hilde had been willing-- she wasn't-- to live in LA.  It's possible, if rather more difficult, to try and sell movie scripts from a non-LA location, while still keeping your day job.)

[more below the break: Writing movie scripts; a sad, mad, bad Postal Service story; Wesley Crusher Gets Horny; and  a little bit more]

Comic Character Deathmatches We'd Like To See

AXE COP

VS.

JIRO
(from Anthony Bourdain's Get Jiro!)

The Arm: A Brief Update

As expected, the insurance company providing Workmen's Comp coverage for my employer wanted a second opinion before agreeing to new surgery and a revision of the original shoulder arthroplasty from December.  So I'm scheduled for an "independent medical examination" on May 8th.  The doctor they're sending me to seems well qualified; he does a lot of knee and shoulder repairs for professional and collegiate sports teams here.

Still having problems, sometimes significant problems, with pain and stiffness in the right arm.  I move the arm slowly and carefully, because quick or abrupt movements make the chronic deep ache turn into sharp bolts of pain.

I don't like taking narcotics, and so far I've managed to get by with doses of Tylenol and Alleve and an occasional Celebrex.  But I'm taking more OTC analgesics, more often, than I ever have before, and that comes with its own cautions.  (Watch those kidneys!)

At this point, as inconvenient and unpleasant as additonal surgery might be, it looks like the best course of action.  Because living like this isn't a long-term option.  This is a drag.

Yeah, "like something the cat dragged in."  Exactly.

So Lafferty, Vonnegut, and van Vogt Walk Into A Bar...

Completed a new short story last night, about 4700 words.  That's three stories in four months; I'm pretty sure that's a record for me. 

Title is "Julius Jeremiah and The Time Machinist", and it's spun off this old fragment of writing I posted about back in January.  I think of it as "R.A. Lafferty meets Kurt Vonnegut meets A.E. van Vogt meet the Marx Brothers."  It's a little on the weird side.  Just a little.

Let it stew for a few days before re-reading and revisions.

Last week I started going to a monthly writers group that meets at the local library.  I'm not certain if I should submit this particular story there.  Hard to tell from one meeting, but I may be the only person in the group who writes sf/fantasy.  That doesn't always work out well.  Science fiction on a more than Star Trek level sometimes requires at least a passing familiarity with the tropes and memes of the genre's past, otherwise it can just be confusing.

(My mother rarely read science fiction, and generally considered it, oh, trash.  She told me once, in my late teens, that she'd tried reading one of the books off my bedroom shelf to see if she could figure out why science fiction appealed to me so much.  She said she could not make heads or tails out of the book, she could not figure out what was going on, that it utterly confused her.  Thinking she might have gotten hold of something like Brian Aldiss' Barefoot In The Head, I asked what the title or author had been.  "I don't remember," she told me.  "but it had a spaceship on the cover."  That sure narrowed it down; I'm still not sure what she tried to read.  But Mom didn't know the 'language' of sf, and I think that's a major reason why she might have found it perplexing.)

The Brave Free Books

I've been checking out a few e-books offered for free online.  One of the popular marketing techniques for getting people to read and talk about your e-book is to offer it for free for a period of time.  In the case of self-published e-books, this usually seems to be for several months, followed by a low price ($2.99 seems to be the most popular price point, or $0.99 if the work isn't a full novel) being attached.  Ideally, the free copies downloaded create word-of-mouth that brings people in to actually buy copies after the free period expires.  (And some self-publishers just want people to read their work, so they keep their work available for free.)

Some traditional publishers also offer particular books either heavily discounted for a short promotional period, or actually free.  The latter mostly seem to be for the first volume in a series, offered briefly when a later volume is just coming onto the market.

One place I've found for those offers is Barnes & Noble's "Free Fridays" .  Every Friday, a free book is available for download to a Nook e-reader or Nook app for a week.  Categories vary from week to week: epic fantasy, romance, urban fantasy, mainstream lit, suspense, inspirational, etc.  So it's a bit of a potluck, but I've downloaded a few Nook books from the Free Friday offerings, and generally find them worth reading.

Well . . . not always.



EVERYBODY'S DAUGHTER by Michael John Sullivan is a Christian time travel fantasy, wherein a troubled father travels back in time to Jerusalem about the time of Jesus' arrival and subsequent crucifixion.  He's followed by his teenage daughter, but the daughter arrives at a different time, when her father is nowhere to be found.  (This is not their first trip back to Jerusalem.  In an earlier book, Necessary Heartbreak, they apparently went back together and met Judas Iscariot, among others; the father still carries some of Judas' silver in his pocket from that earlier trip.)

The book unfortunately opens with a howler of a first sentence: "Jingling the silver coins between his fingers that he had retrieved so many centuries ago[...]".  The writing, on a sentence level, gets better after that, but I had trouble with the characterization and plotting of the book.  The characters seemed inconsistent, especially some of the secondary characters.  Ideally, plot flows naturally from characters' actions as they react to the events around them.  I got the impression that Sullivan had plot points planned, and he forced his characters to move towards those plot points whether they wanted to or not. 

The big choking point came with trying to figure out just when the father and daughter had made their separate arrivals in Jerusalem.  For most of the book, it appeared that they had arrived at least months apart.  I also wondered if the father and daughter's presence might have created two separate timelines.  But if the last few chapters Sullivan seems to be saying they were not only in the same timeline, but only a few days apart.  My suspension of disbelief was blown out the window.

(Sullivan's portrayal of Jesus is also a very "Godly", Sunday-school version.  When I read portrayals of Jesus, I always prefer they be more human, with smelly armpits, dirty feet, and flashes of temper and despair.)

I wanted to like the book.  I didn't.

(Since the Free Friday offering, the price on the ebook has gone back to $3.47)


From the general free listings at B&N, I also tried one of the "always-free" books:

KILL-BASA: NEW FLAVORS IN ZOMBIE HORROR by Sean Graham is a collection of five zombie stories.  Most are very pulpish, with slam-bang non-stop action.  "Dummies" gives a more traditional, non-Romero style zombie story.  "Lee's Decision" has Robert E. Lee making a Faustian bargain to win the Civil War.   But neither story impressed me, despite the attempt to put a twist on the idea of zombies.

The one story that did impress me, a bit, was "Ten Count".  It was a Romero-style zombie story, a meme that's getting really stale.  But it impressed me because the characters in it weren't cartoons or cardboard, which was where the other stories mostly failed.   But it needed polish, it needed still more depth to the characters.  It impressed me because it had potential, but it also disappointed because it could have been harder-hitting, even moving, with a bit more work and development. 

Sean Graham's had a number of other short stories published in small press venues.  I'd like to see him get a little more experience and practice before I try his work again.


I've got a few more of the Free Friday offerings and a couple of other free books sitting in the Nook app on my smartphone.  I may make "The Brave Free Books" a semi-regular feature here.

Self-Publishing: Should I Join The Crowd?

I've been eyeing the explosive growth in self-publishing over the last few years, and pondering the idea of collecting together some of the short stories I've had published over the years.  I'm about 98% decided to go ahead with the idea.

One of the reasons I haven't considered it more seriously until now is that self-publishing was mostly seen as the field of amateurs and not-ready-for-prime-time writers, the people who in previous eras would have paid big bucks to vanity presses for a pallet-load of printed books that would sit in their garage forever afterwards.

The explosion started with the advent of print-on-demand publishers like Lulu.com, where the book's contents would sit as an electronic file on Lulu's servers, until -- Oh, my god! -- someone actually ordered and paid for a single copy to be printed and shipped.  Drawback: Printing books one at a time, even with largely automated and standardized printing technology, made the books pretty expensive.

Enter the spreading democratization of e-books.  The Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, the Sony Reader, e-reading applications for computers and smartphones, all creating an increasingly large base of customers who are willing to read books off a video display instead of having an actual printed book in their hands.  Concurrent with that, an explosion of services started coming available for ordinary citizens to produce and make available their own works.  (Smashwords is probably the best known.)

The problem is making your e-book stand out from the crowd.  Traditional publishers are still able to provide better design, marketing and distribution resources, even for their shiny new e-book divisions.  Professional writers, if they can, still prefer to be published that way.  But we're seeing more and more pro writers using e-books as a way to replace the largely vanished backlist, to republish their older books that have gone out of print and had rights reverted.  This, in turn, is giving self-published e-books a new measure of respectability.  I think this is a great thing.

But there are still all the amateur and not-ready writers out there still publishing their darlings in the thousands, with their thumbnail images cluttering up display pages on numerous bookseller websites.  It's a mob out there, and you need to stand out somehow.

One way is to have a name.  That's one reason more and more professionals are putting their backlist books online; they're a known quantity, so they make (usually slow, but steady) sales based on that recognition factor.

I don't have much of a name.  People tend not to remember mostly-short-stories writers, even the best (otherwise Robert Reed would be a science-fiction superstar).  My output of short stories, even at my best, was usually only two or three a year, not all of which sold.  Scattered over thirty years, I didn't get published frequently enough to be remembered much between stories, or over my writing career (such as it was).  Google me, and the big-ticket item that stands out is the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ("Clues") I wrote back in 1990.  That's not fodder for re-publishing.

But a few of my stories still get occasionally remembered and inquired about, particularly "Death and the Ugly Woman".  So if I were to put together a collection, that be the lead story.  So I've got a little (tiny) (eensy-weeny) advantage over a complete newbie casting their work into the waters of e-commerce.

I've looked over my published stories; not all of them have a crying need to be reprinted.  I'm thinking of collecting about a half dozen of the best published stories, plus a few selections from my unsold efforts.  (Some of those unsold works deserved their fate, but a few of them... they may not have sold, but dammit... they should have!)

One of the most common things that makes people look askance at self-published books are the covers.  Designing a good book cover is a skill.  It's not a skill quickly learned.  I've got a little (tiny) (eensy-weeny) advantage there, too.  I've been putting out fanzines since the early 70's, and have been goofing around with covers and illustrations almost all that time.   Some of those goofing-arounds worked, some didn't, and I hope I've learned a little about which is which in all that time.  Plus I did the rough concept and design for COPPER STAR, the "Southwestern fantasy" anthology I edited and produced for the 1991 World Fantasy Convention.  (It got a professional tweaking before going to press.)

Looking at cover images of self-published books is great fun, if you like having your eyeballs bleed.  There are some... spectacularly dreadful... covers out there.  And lots and lots more that loudly go *clunk* or are just just unimpressive.  So one of the most important things I'd want would be a striking cover.

I've been looking at a lot of images online.  Because I'm a tightwad, I'd prefer to use cover elements available under public domain.  A detail from Heironymous Bosch got strongly considered; some other images got considered and abandoned.  I also came across a couple of pieces on DeviantArt that could have been suitable, if I decided to go ahead and pay for repro rights.  But then I stumbled across the work of Kathe Kollwitz, a German Expressionist artist in the early part of the 20th Century.  In particular, a 1921 print called "The Widow" seemed to have strong resonance with the themes of sorrow and loss in "Death and the Ugly Woman".  In keeping with the laudatory principle of K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid), I worked up a cover rough using just black and white and red.  I think it works pretty well.

This isn't a finished cover yet. The title font has some clear kerning problems, and the author-name font looks too heavy. I put this together using some of the default fonts that came installed with Word 2007, and the final fonts will almost certainly be different.  Typographical placement and size will probably be tweaked a bit, too.  But it shows what I'm trying for, and I think it works pretty well.

 

A cover's just one step. Final decisions on contents, supplementary material, page design, proofreading, ISBN and barcodes, pricing, etc., etc., are still ahead.  Plus considerable study and fiddling around with software and resources to make it the best I can make it.  (thebookdesigner.com has a lot of useful articles.)  I figure it will probably be several months before the collection is available, probably longer if my second shoulder surgery happens in the interim.

 

Who Will Win The Game of Thrones? THIS Guy:




HOT PIE

That's right, "Hot Pie", one of the most-minor of the many minor named characters on Game of Thrones.

Everybody else  on the damn show is either stuck in dangerous, life-threatening situations, or actively seeking out dangerous, life-threatening situations.

Not Hot Pie.  When he sees an opportunity to spend his time baking bread at a country inn, he takes it.  He drops off the radar, keeps his head down, and bides his time.

Because all he has to do is wait long enough, and GRRM will kill off every other character.  He can drive into Kings' Landing with a wagonload of bread for the populace, step over the bodies littering the throne room, and take an unopposed seat on the Iron Throne.

Hot Pie.  Smartest fucking guy in fucking Westeros.

Arizona BBQ Festival 2013

Every once in a while Hilde and I need to remind ourselves that there's more to the world than the house and doctors' offices.  So when I saw there was a barbeque festival being held this weekend in Scottsdale, I went ahead and got tickets.

 

The Arizona BBQ Festival was held on the grounds of Salt River Fields, a large multi-diamond baseball/sports facility.  Besides numerous BBQ and other food vendors, there was live music, cooking demonstrations, the Redneck Games Arena---

 

---where they had such events as Dead Lawnmower Racing, Hubcap Hurling, Arm Wrestling, and Bobbing For Pigs Feet.  We left a little early to catch the contests for Best Redneck Moustache, Best Redneck Tattoo, and Best Daisy Dukes & Cowboy Boots.

There was also a children's area, with lots of inflatable slides and other activities for the kids there.

 

We caught several of the cooking demonstrations.  The 4:00 event was Chef Craig Driml of Uncle Bear's Grill & Bar (a growing chain of "comfort food" -- burgers, pizzas, BBQ, chili, etc -- restaurants, named after the owner's dog), where some very nice pulled pork sliders were prepared and served to the audience.

 

The 5:00 demo was by Chef Mel Mecinas from the Four Seasons Resort in North Scottsdale.  The Four Seasons is very upscale, and I have to say there was a noticeable difference in quality between Uncle Bear's food ("very nice", as I said above) and the brisket and coleslaw prepared by Chef Mecinas.  The brisket was excellent, deeply flavored, pulling apart easily, and served so fresh from the oven that the slices of meat were still hot enough to zing your fingertips if you tried to eat the brisket by hand.  But what really impressed me was Mecinas' coleslaw.

 

I detest coleslaw.  It always seems to be a standard side dish for BBQ, fried chicken, and other comfort-food dishes, and it always sucks.  It takes ingredients that are perfectly usable and edible in other dishes, and combines them into a product to which the best reaction is "Blehhh."  In the last forty years or more, I don't think I've eaten more than a teaspoon or two of the default-coleslaw found on most tables.  But I tried a forkful of Mecinas' coleslaw... and I wanted more.  Holy crap, it tasted good.  Really no-frikkin'-around good.

 

I wasn't the only person in the demo's audience impressed by the coleslaw.  Mecinas was asked if a recipe was available.  No, actually; he'd thrown the coleslaw together by eye and taste, and didn't have formal proportions or measurements available.  But here's the list of ingredients, as closely as I could hear or reconstruct them. (The helicopter-rides vendor was close by, and copters taking off or landing occasionally drowned out the audio in the cooking demo tent.):

• Napa cabbage
• Raddichio
• Apple
• Fennel
• Fresh tarragon
• Celery seed
• 2 parts creme fraiche
• 1 part mayonaisse
• Sherry vinegar
• Cider vinegar
• Sugar

There may also have been a dash of kosher salt and/or pepper in there.  But now I want to go to Four Seasons and try their restaurants.

One of the bands listed to perform at the Festival, Voodoo Swing, sounded like the type of fast-beat, pounding-rhythm ("Rockabilly" is the usual term) performers I frequently enjoy.  But Hilde and I were still in line at one of the food vendors on the opposite side of the Festival when they began their set.  Which was actually a good thing.  I've complained before that too many live performers seem to feel obliged to turn their amplifiers to "11" when they're playing in public.  Voodoo Swing appears to be yet another.  I could hear their music pretty damn well even way over in the food court area.  If I'd been in the official audience area by the bandstand, it would have been physically painful.

As it turned out, I did enjoy Voodoo Swing, as long as I was far enough away to hear them at a tolerable level.  Here's a YouTube video for "My Rockabilly Martian Gal" from their latest album.  (C'mon, could I really write a post this long without including a science-fiction connection?)

And that's how we spent an afternoon actually acting like normal people.

 

Warrior-Monks, Celibacy, and PERSON OF INTEREST

Hilde and I have been watching the CBS drama PERSON OF INTEREST since it began.  Synopsis for those who haven't:  Following 9/11, the US government financed the building of an advanced computer system capable of hacking and coordinating data from, essentially, every security camera, audio pickup, internet communication, and database in the US, and then identifying potential terroists before they act.  Side-effect, largely irrelevant to the government, is that "The Machine" (secured in a hidden location) can also identify ordinary citizens who are at risk for (or about to commit) crime and danger.  HAROLD FINCH, the computer genius who built the Machine (but retained backdoor access to its findings) has gone underground for reasons still not fully disclosed.  He recruits JOHN REESE, a disillusioned former US covert-operations operative, to help save (or stop) these at-risk (or risky) individuals.  Two NYPD detectives, CARTER and FUSCO, also regularly assist in these missions.  Additional useful assistance is occasionally given by others.

What this reminded me of initially was THE SHADOW, the pulp hero that originated back in the 1930's.  Finch acts as the more cerebral "Lamont Cranston" aspect of the hero, whereas Reese is the physical "action-hero" aspect, skilled in martial arts and backed up by guns.  The Shadow also had a cadre of assistants he called on from time to time.

But what struck me most recently while watching was that all the major characters are celibate.  Not in a declared "Hey, we're celibate!" manner.  In Finch's and Reese's case, this seems to be a deliberate choice, because their current careers would put anyone close to them at high risk.  Reese has had clear opportunities offered to him, and it's fairly clear that he turned them down.

Carter and Fusco are also portrayed as celibate, though not always by choice.  Part of the recent story arc across multiple episodes featured a potential romantic partner for Carter... who was murdered before it could fully develop.  Fusco is divorced, with a young son, but he's also an overweight, middle-aged, dumpy-looking guy with an abrasive personality who probably has never had all that much luck romantically even in his best days. 

(One episode had two simultaneous notifications from the Machine, so while Finch and Reese took on the "big" mission, they let Fusco handle the "easy" case.  Throughout the rest of the episode, we saw brief glimpses of Fusco and the supermodel-gorgeous woman he was rescuing involved in high-speed chases, fierce firefights, and all the typical things that Reese usually gets into.   Fusco got to be John-Reese-For-A-Day.  And at episode's end, the supermodel-gorgeous woman gives Fusco a long, intense kiss... and then walks away.)

(I actually find Fusco the most interesting character on POI.  When we first met his character, he was one of a group of corrupt, bribe-taking cops.  After Reese (barely) spared Fusco's life when the corrupt cops tried to kill Reese, Fusco was essentially blackmailed into assisting Finch and Reese in their further operations.  Slowly, he's found a new sense of direction and self-respect.  Finch, Reese, and Carter are all essentially "good guys" from the beginning.  But Fusco is a bad guy who's struggling to escape his corrupt past and become a good man again.  Kudos to actor Kevin Chapman for his portrayal.)

Once I noticed the celibate aspects of the main characters, I started thinking "Hey, these guys are Warrior-Monks!"  Another item to support this is that, when possible, Reese avoids killing bad guys and shoots them in the knees instead.  (The busiest, and richest, doctors in New York City are orthopedic surgeons.)

Ther have been some pretty strong hints as the series progresses that The Machine is becoming more than a machine, that it's developing its own intelligence and consciousness.  Am I saying that Finch and Reese are "on a mission from God"?  It seems the series might be moving in that direction.  (It's a J.J. Abrams series, who's not unknown for inserting mystical or theological elements into other works.)

And, if nothing else makes you want to watch:  "Bear", Best Dog On Television:

Ambitious Cat Is Ambitious

Tyr: "What?  The dog wasn't using it."

posted from Bloggeroid

Paolo Soleri, 1919-2013

I've been surprised that I've seen so little mention in science-fiction circles of the April 9th death of visionary architect Paolo Soleri. Soleri originated the term "arcology".

The idea of an arcology is an imploded city, the opposite of sururban sprawl. His massive book, THE CITY IN THE IMAGE OF MAN (1969), featured drawings of massive (but relatively small-footprint) self-contained cities, cities that reached high into the sky and deep into the ground. Because they were designed to be self-contained and self-supporting, they could be located in marginal areas. (One design was for a city using air-space by spanning a section of the Grand Canyon.)

A 2011 article on ARCH DAILY gave a good overview of his life and career.  He spent more than forty years slowly building a small-scale version (5,000 intended population) arcology, Arcosanti, still not complete, in rural Arizona, assisted by students and acolytes.  With shoestring funding (mostly by sales of ceramic and metal bells made by Soleri) and built largely with hand labor, even the fraction completed so far is impressive. 

I believe Soleri's work was one of the big inspirations for Robert Silverberg's "Urban Monad" stories (collected as THE WORLD INSIDE), tales of life inside mile-high skyscraper-cities.  Soleri's work and ideas have influenced other writers' "future cities" as well.

Personally, I came across a copy of CITY IN THE IMAGE OF MAN in the Arizona State University library in the early 1970's.  (It's fair to call it a coffee-table book; it's literally about the size of a coffee-table top.) "Wow," I said as I paged through it.  "Wow."  Sensawunda extreme.

Soleri may not have been a science-fiction writer, but his vision and ideas have surely influenced the field.  So, again, I'm surprised that I haven't seen more SF people commenting on his death.

Paolo Soleri, 1919-2013

Hilde and Tabbi

Hilde and Tabbi

posted from Bloggeroid

The Arm: Pain Issues, and A Probable Re-Do

My most recent post about breaking my arm and the subsequent recovery process, "Two Steps Back", reported that I'd started experiencing a recurrence of pain at a level similar to a month or so after the surgery in December.

Up to that point, about mid-March, recovery had been slow but forward.  My range of motion and ability to use the right arm fell into three categories:

• The Functional Zone, essentially pain-free, mostly involving use of the hand, wrist and forearm, plus about 40 to 45 degrees of forward-lifting motion (less for sideways motion) for the arm as a whole. 
• Then there was the Uncomfortable Zone, up to about 90 degrees forward, where I could feel some strain and aching while I was using the arm, but the strain and ache would recede quickly when I dropped back into the Functional Zone. 
• Then there was the Forbidden Zone, trying to go up past that 90-degree point (only a few degrees unassisted, a bit further with assistance or exercise pulleys), where the aching slid into the point of actual sharp pain, and where it would still ache and throb for a fair while after dropping back into the more usable Zones. 
• Also, the overall strength of the arm was much better than when I first started therapy for the arm, but still a lot weaker than before the accident.

A lot of that progress has been lost.  When the pain started getting worse again, it was accompanied by intermittent scraping and grating sensations from within the shoulder.  (Not all the time, but any scraping sensations is cause for worry.)  Currently, even when the arm is just hanging at my side, there's a slight but noticeable aching; using the arm beyond that, even the light use I hadn't had much trouble with, makes the aching stronger, eventually going into actual sharp pain.  I've gone back to wearing my arm sling again when it gets bad; having the arm supported gives some relief, but it still takes longer, sometimes a lot longer, for the pain and aching to recede. 

The Functional Zone has shrunk, the Uncomfortable Zone has increased, the Forbidden Zone is still forbidden, and pain has become more chronic again.  This is not good.

I had a fresh set of x-rays done after the grating sensations started, and I was able to move up my next appointment with my orthopedic doctor at Mayo.  I saw him yesterday.

I was hoping what he'd tell me was "Your problem's simple.  I can do a laproscopic procedure, minimally invasive, in and out the same day, and you'll be back on track to recovery quickly."

No such luck.  The major source of problems appears to be that the tuberosity where the rotator cuff attaches to the humerus head replacement is displaced by a significant margin.  This is equivalent to having a major rotator cuff tear.  (And probably explains why I was able to get my arm up to 90 degrees with therapy, but increases beyond that have been minimal and painful.)

My doctor at Mayo isn't the surgeon who replaced the joint in December.  Immediately after the accident, I was taken to the closest hospital with a trauma unit, and the surgery was done there, not at Mayo, where I receive most of my usual medical care.  While it's a nearly unbreakable rule for doctors to badmouth other doctors, I felt a clear vibe of "If it had been me doing the replacement, you wouldn't have this problem."

A couple of additional factors may also be contributing:  Besides the actual break in the arm bone, the shoulder bones were badly compressed and squeezed in the accident.  There may still be lingering trauma after-effects from that.  And there was also a small shadow in the new x-ray that the doctor thought might be a loose bone fragment floating free.

The doctor offered several possible ways to proceed from this point:

• Continue as before, with exercise and physical therapy, and hope that the pain and other problems get better.
• Accept living a life with chronic pain.
• Or go back into surgery for a reverse shoulder arthroplasty, replacing the first artificial joint with a different type.

The reverse shoulder prosthesis works backwards from the standard replacement prosthesis: Instead of putting a new ball-head on the arm bone, the ball head is screwed into the shoulder joint and a "cup" for it to fit into the arm bone.  Also, with the reverse prosthesis, arm and shoulder movement comes primarily from the deltoid muscle, rather than the rotator cuff.

The different joint won't give me a better range of motion.  Best results will still probably fall into the 75% to 85% range.  So even in a best-case scenario, my right arm is going to have limitations for the rest of my life.  OK, I can accept that.  I can live with that. I can do work-arounds for that.  (As if I had a choice.)

The chronic pain issue is a lot more intimidating.  A lot scarier.  Because this: Pain makes you stupid.

When you're in pain, even when you're not actually sweating or whimpering,  even when it's "normal pain" and not "sharp pain" or "intense pain", it's there, in your head, making itself known, insisting you recognize it.  It takes up brainspace that would normally be available for the ubiquitous "stuff" our lives are filled with.  Pain makes you lose focus, lose attention, lose thought.  Pain makes you stupid.

I'm not the most focused or organized person, to say the least.  (I suspect I'd probably score fairly high on an attention-deficit-disorder checklist.) I can't afford -- emotionally or pragmatically -- to be any dumber than I already am.  Living life with chronic pain like I've had the past several weeks is not an option.

My orthopedic doctor is having me do a shoulder aspiration on Monday.  This is where they draw some fluid from the shoulder area and send it for a battery of tests to check for any signs of infection.  It's also a requirement for surgery.  (Because you really, really, don't want a bone infection.)  So, unless there's significant improvement in the shoulder and attendant pain in the next few weeks (it takes about two weeks to get full test results back), I most likely will be having a new round of shoulder surgery sometime after that.

(Scheduling will partly depend on how much objection Workmens' Comp raises to the idea of a complete re-do of surgery.  I've actually been astonished by how cooperative and quick Travellers Insurance --who provide Workmens Comp insurance coverage for my employer -- has been in covering all the expenses.  On the other hand, they've already laid out over $100,000 on my case, and might want to send me for, at the least, a second opinion before agreeing to a new operation.)

I'm not at all happy about the idea of a second surgery, one that will put my progress back to the point immediately after the last surgery, with still more months of recovery and therapy following.  This seems an appropriate visual reference:

Signs of Spring

 

Screw the groundhog.  You know it's spring when the lizards start leapin'.

Those Darn Gorillas!

Back in my misspent youth, when comics were brain-rotting, life-ruining reading material (My Mom said so; she wouldn't lie to me, would she?), I read a lot of comics.  (Explains quite a bit, doesn't it?)  One of my favorite comics was STRANGE ADVENTURES, a science-fiction anthology-type comic.  Besides the more usual types of science fiction, with space aliens, shrinking serums, invisibility rays, giant monsters and the usual ilk, SA had... gorillas.  Quite a lot of gorillas, actually.

 

For whatever reason, writers for SA really loved gorillas.  Or maybe they were just scared of gorillas. 

 

Gorillas might also have been intended as a stand-in for Communists.  Communists were friggin everywhere back in the 50's and 60's.  (That monster in your closet when you were a little kid?  Commie.)  You couldn't actually see very many Communists, but you knew they were there, somewhere, plotting.

 

Back to gorillas.  Gorillas in STRANGE ADVENTURES might seem, at first, to be a mixed bag of unrelated and different stories, but once you realize that there was an extended story arc being told non-sequentially, you can see the entire far-reaching saga of Gorilla Vs. Human:

 

 

 

Our first mistake is giving gorillas familiarity with human thought processes.

 

Ern Malley and the Mithradatum of Arrogance

It's April Fool's Day.  Generally not an occasion I enjoy; I was the butt of too many "jokes" as a kid to appreciate them as an adult.  Also, it's confusing, because on some websites, like BOING BOING or TALKING POINTS MEMO, it can be hard to tell which posts are meant to be real and which the April Fool' hoax.

But here's an old hoax that I find rather appealing, because both hoaxed and hoaxers ended up hoist by their own petard:  Ern Malley, Australian Poet

Back in Australian poetry circles of 1944, there was a bit of antagonism between the traditionalist poets, using established formats and tropes, and the modernists, using symbolism and new styles like blank verse and free verse.

The leading figure among the modernists was a charismatic and brilliant fellow named Max Harris, who published a literary magazine, ANGRY PENGUINS, where modernist work and studies were presented.  Besides being well-liked and well-regarded, he was also a handsome fellow and popular with the ladies.  Whether that latter had anything to do with the friction between Harris and the traditionalist circles, I can't say, but it probably didn't help.

Two Australian traditionalist poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, came up with an idea to discredit the modernist school of poetry and humiliate Harris at the same time.  They wrote a set of sixteen poems, aping the modernist style, using what they considered the worst aspects of modernism.  They wrote, in their eyes, bad poems in a bad school of poetry.

They then created Ern Malley, unknown poet, dead poet, as the author of the poems, dead of Grave's Disease at a tragically young age, leaving only the sixteen poems as his legacy.  An equally imaginary sister, "Esther Malley", sent the poems to Harris, asking for an evaluation.

Harris published the poems in ANGRY PENGUINS, hailing the discovery of an accomplished (and tragically dead) new poet.

Then the truth came out.  And it was, indeed, embarassing and humiliating to Harris, that he'd been successfully fooled by two hoaxers.

Except... Harris stood by his judgment of the "Ern Malley" poems, insisting that they were worthwhile and meritorious, regardless of the true circumstances of their origin.

And... over the years, time has proven him right.  The Ern Malley poems have been reprinted numerous times, been the subject of critical studies, and inspired paintings and other art.  Whereas the traditionalist poetry written by Malley's creators has faded and vanished into the trashbin of history; they're remembered only for the merits of the poetry they wrote as "bad examples" of a poetry school they despised.

Max Harris went on past the embarassment of being hoaxed, becoming firmly established as one of Australia's distinguished men of letters before his death in 1995. 

Well, except for the obscenity trial.  Because the Malley poems contained a number of "sexual references", Harris, as the publisher of the poems, was brought to court on obscenity charges.  This was the bizarre icing on the hoax cake.  It's hard to believe that an obscenity charge could be seriously made even in the more Puritanical era of 1944.  From ernmalley.com, a description of one of the prosecution's arguments:

Detective Vogelesang, for the prosecution, insisted that Night Piece was obscene because: "Apparently someone is shining a torch in the dark, visiting through the park gates. To my mind they were going there for some disapproved motive ... I have found that people who go into parks at night go there for immoral purposes".
 

Even in 1940, that sounds like it would have been a stretch.   Reading that claim today, the pertinent words would be more along the lines of "mentally deranged".  Nonetheless, Harris was found guilty, although with a fairly light penalty, a five pound fine in lieu of six weeks in jail.


After the jump, I'll provide samples of both Ern Malley's and Max Harris' poetry.   Before that, though, a little craft project from cordit.org.au:

Tsundoku, and the Ace Science Fiction Specials

If I had a word tattooed on my forehead, it would likely be this one:

I think I've mentioned before that I tend to buy more books than I have time to read.  When you've been doing that for forty years, your TBR pile tends to get, umm, large.

The oldest book in that TBR pile (which is actually multiple piles, and shelves, and boxes) is one of the old Ace Science Fiction Specials, Bruce McAllister's Humanity Prime:

I actually took this with me to Army Basic Training in 1972, with the intention of reading it in my spare time.   HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!  Spare time in Basic Training?  What a charmingly naive concept.  In the years since then, it's floated around wherever I've lived, sometimes in handy reach, sometimes in an accessible but inconvenient spot, and sometimes unfindable for years at a stretch.  (Current status: unfindable.)

I think one of the reasons I never quite got around to actually reading the book is that it reminds me of a sad moment in science fiction history.  Humanity Prime was the first Ace Science Fiction Special to not have a cover by Leo & Diane Dillon.

The Ace Science Fiction Specials were edited by Terry Carr at Ace Books.  Carr was the junior SF editor at Ace, under the senior SF editor Don Wollheim.  Wollheim discovered science fiction in the 1930, while Carr was a generation younger, becoming active in SF fandom in the 50's.  Ace Books' SF line, while having some gems, was mostly oriented towards a more pulpish, action-adventure style of plotting and writing.  (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

In the 1960's, SF began going through a period of experimentation and horizon-expanding, as a new generation of writers, dissatisfied with the pulp traditions and styles of most SF, tried to write new works of greater depth and style.  (The "new" generation included some established writers like Robert Silverberg and John Brunner, known for rapidly-written slam-bang SF stories and novels, who chose to stretch their abilities in new directions.)

Terry Carr was more open to this new style of SF, and he was able to get Wollheim and their bosses at Ace to approve a "Special" line of Ace books, giving these new and upcoming writers a venue for their books.  A significant number of the Ace Science Fiction Specials that Carr brought out have gone on to be regarded as classics of the SF genre.  (Left Hand of Darkness by Le Guin, Pavane by Keith Roberts, Past Master by Lafferty among them.  Many other titles in the line were nominated for or won Hugo and Nebula awards.)

The Specials were distinguished from Ace's regular line of books by having distinctively styled covers, done by Leo & Diane Dillon.  The Dillons' paintings were done in styles more reminiscent of other media (stained glass, batik fabric patterns), "artistic" as opposed to the pulp-style "illustration" of most paperback covers.  Here are some of my favorites:

The bad news was: The Ace Science Fiction Specials didn't sell as well as hoped.  The books, and their covers, were getting great respect and admiration, and occasional awards, within the SF field, but not from the buying public.  Ace Books decided (I'm not sure from what level, Wollheim or someone higher) that the covers were just too unusual; the public didn't recognize them as science fiction.  So the Dillons were dropped as the cover artists for further Specials.

The Davis Meltzer cover for Humanity Prime is not a bad cover.  But it's not a great cover, either.  I'm still a bit wistful that we never got to see what the Dillons might have done with this book or the others in the Specials line.  And I think that regret may be part of why, in all the years since I first bought it, I've never actually read the book behind that first non-Dillon cover.  To me, a cover by the Dillons was an integral part of an Ace Science Fiction Special.

Best Pet Ever

The "Why Dinosaurs Are The Ultimate Childhood Companion" post over at Tor.com brought to mind The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth, a 1956 middle-grade book about a farmboy raising a triceratops that hatches from an oversized egg laid by a very startled hen.   I wanted my own triceratops, dammit! This is one of the great illustrations by Louis Darling:

 

I may make that my computer's next wallpaper.

This and That -- links, etc.

Some interestings things I've seen around the Internet:

Doc Savage Fantasy Covers -- These have apparently been around for a few years, but I hadn't seen them before.  Kev Wilson mashed up real Doc Savage paperback covers to produce "what-if" adventures mixing doc with  some classic (and some not so classic) characters.  Such as this one:

Ju-Jutsu Suffragettes -- kicking ass for equality

Terminator Typist -- past and future meet

Over the years I've seen lots of exterior photos of Gaudi's famous La Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, but today's the first time I've seen one of the inside ceiling.  Striking and strange.

Nazi Bunnies of Buchenwald -- the Wisconsin Historical Society, of all websites, relates the boggling story of how the Nazi SS raised well-fed, well-housed Angora rabbits at Aushwitz and other concentration camps, simultaneous with starving and working to death thousands of human prisoners.

Tobor On Television -- Way back in my misspent youth, I spent many a Saturday morning watching the weekly "Creature Feature",  showing (mostly bad) horror and science fiction movies.  One I had fond memories of was Tobor the Great, wherein a young boy fought bad guys with his 9-foot tall robot.  I always remembered Tobor as pretty cool-looking, better than Robbie or Gort; looking at pictures of Tobor again some fifty years on, ehh, not so much.  What I didn't know until now was that there was an attempt to spin-off Tobor into a television series, HERE COMES TOBOR; the unsold pilot is available for viewing on archive.org.  (Also on YouTube.)

Stephen King Reviews Joyce Carol Oates' THE ACCURSED -- Here's a snippet of the review:

Annabel Slade (lovely, modest, corseted) is abducted by a demon lover named Axson Mayte in full view of a standing-room-only church congregation mere seconds after her marriage to dashing Dabney Bayard. She’s spirited away to the Bog Kingdom, a terrible wasteland where she is subjected to the Unspeakable (van Dyck loves that word) and then made to clean the filthy lower levels of the castle with her fellow abductees, who have been reduced to the state of half-human zombies. She escapes and returns home, dirty and barely sane, just in time to die giving birth to something both Unspeakable and Ambiguous (perhaps a snake, perhaps an infant with its innards on the outards).

I don't know about you, but reading that (and it's only about a small part of the sprawling novel) makes me sad that Edward Gorey isn't still alive to produce illustrations for Oates' novel.

- - - - -

 



Five Hundred

 

 

This is the 500th post to UNDULANT FEVER since I began on June 30th, 2004.  A bit over one post per week, on average.

I didn't start keeping track of statistics for the blog until 2008.  Judging from those stats, the best way to increase pageviews for your blog is to write about teapots.  "Two-Fer Teapots" , from 2010, has the second-most pageviews (273).  Other posts about teapot-based ceramic competitions also have high pageviews.

I could probably increase pageviews more by adding keywords to posts, and just by talking it up more out in the real world.  A few posts, like my "Shots In The Dark" and "Lunatics, Imbeciles, and Saboteurs" have been linked to a few times by other blogs.  Most posts get ten or twenty page views, then taper off.  I find myself and my opinions fascinating, but not so much by most people, apparently.

But I've been writing things like this blog long before blogs existed.  I started publishing fanzines and personalzines back in the 1970's, on that old-fashioned "paper" stuff.  (The title UNDULANT FEVER was originally used for a paper personalzine.)  It's a place to leave a record of my life and thoughts.  So it's not a habit I'm likely to break anytime soon.

The Arm: Two Steps Back

Over the months since my accident and breaking the heck out of my right arm and bunging up the shoulder, I've been slowly improving following surgery, recuperation and physical therapy.  Slow, but continuous improvement.

The last several days, however, I've been feeling intermittent scraping and grating sensations in that shoulder, accompanied by renewed pain.  Not as bad as the intial injury, or right after the surgery, but definitely a major step back from where I'd gotten to in recovery.

I'm babying the arm, and even thinking about putting the sling back on, to see if it'll recover by itself.  But I have a tendency to catastrophize the future, and my true worry is that the prosthetic joint may have started to break loose or that the shoulder bones (which got compressed together pretty badly in the accident) have moved into a position where they're rubbing together.  I've tried to move up my next appointment with the orthopedic doctor at Mayo, in mid-April, but his schedule is booked solid; his secretary said she'll try and move me into any opening that becomes available.

Worst-case scenario: I end up having surgery again, possibly a complete re-do of the joint-replacement procedure, putting me back to where I was right after the first surgery.  But I won't know for sure until I get new x-rays and an evaluation.  I'll keep nudging the doctor to try and squeeze me in sooner.  (Because, y'know, the uncertainty is just one more bit of worry on top of worry.)

 

A Simple Breakfast, and A Useful App

Diced fruit (strawberries & mangos), a shotglass (1 oz.) of half-&-half, a bit of sugar.  About 200 calories.

I've been trying to eat a little healthier.  One of the annoying side effects of breaking the arm is that I get a lot less exercise when I stay at home.  (My job usually called for about 3 to 5 miles worth of walking per shift.)  So I gained about eight pounds in the first month after the accident.  Since extra pounds had already been slowly creeping up on me even before the accident, that meant I got back up into the 190's.  Ideally, I'd like to be about 165 pounds.

Those height-&-weight charts say my ideal weight should be about 155, but on the rare occasion when I've gotten down to that weight, I look gaunt, I don't feel great, and I'm hungry all the time.  (True story: The last time I got down to 155, I was still working as a letter carrier, and several of my customers expressed concern that I had cancer.)

Getting down to 165 is do-able (I've done it before), I look good and feel good, and with a bit of time management and planning I can usually stay within a few pounds of that goal for a considerable time.  I've managed, even with the arm restricting my exercise, to drop back down to 187 since the end of February, about a 5 pound loss.

The main tool I've been using to monitor my eating habits and activity is an Android app called Noom.  No, I don't know what "Noom" is supposed to mean, other than being "moon" spelled backwards.

I've used earlier versions of Noom before with some success, tempered by problems with the application.  An earlier version kept freezing up in mid-action, and a later version presented itself in ways that annoyed me.  One example was that they used sports-similes to judge food amounts: "golf ball size", "tennis ball size", etc.  Hey, there are people who have so little interest in sports that they have only the vaguest idea how big a baseball or softball is.  (I'm the only person I know of who flunked grade school P.E.  Yes, I really did.  I was the original "does not play well with others" kid.)

The newest update, which I downloaded onto my smartphone last month, seems to have fixed most of those problems.  Operates smoothly, and you can now choose between measuring by simile or by actual measurements.

One of the things I like about Noom, compared to other diet or fitness planners, is that they use an estimation system for food calories and value.  Other planners I tried had huge databases of specific foods and brands, and it was easy to get lost and spend lots of time finding and entering  those specific choices. 

Noom's first-level food choices divides food into three major categories, "Green" for healthy foods, "Yellow" for okay foods, and "Red" for foods that should be avoided or minimalized.  Each of those wide categories has two to three dozen subcategories, broken down into more specific but not too-specific choices (egg whites are "Green", whole eggs are "Yellow", bacon is "Red").  Clicking on one of those subcategories gives you various amounts to choose from for what your meal contained and calorie counts ranging from 25 for a tiny "Green" portion to 600 calories for a large "Red" portion.  I find this system a lot easier and quicker to use than other planners' more detailed breakdowns.

But it can get even quicker and easier.  When you've familiarized yourself with a bunch of portion sizes and calorie counts for various foods, you can go straight to a "Dial A Menu" feature that lets you enter the general category, portion size and calorie count in a single click.

Noom also has features to track exercise and weight, and provides daily tasks and advice to help keep you on track and motivated.

I use the free version, which I find sufficient.  The paid version ($9.99 per month, yikes!) features extra individualized coaching and guidance.  Android-only, though they're supposed to be working on an iPhone version.

 

My Fantabulous Career In LOL-Writing Continues Apace

My latest submission to icanhascheezeburger.com made the "Celebs" home page:

The Arm: Latest Update

Saw my orthopedic doctor at Mayo again yesterday.  Got permission to start the next phase of physical therapy, with resistance training and stronger therapist-assisted stretching.  Also got a limited work release, allowing me to work up to two hours at a stretch, twice a day for the time being; the other limitations are not to use that arm for more than 20 pounds, and to avoid repetitive hammering motions.

That's good news, but it's not likely I'll be called back to work within those limitations; they really need me able to work an 8-hour stretch (or 12-hour shifts on weekends) to get me back onto the schedule.  So I'll probably remain off work until those limitations are removed.  Next appointment is in mid-April, when they'll evaluate again.

This is assuming I get back to that job at all.  I spoke to the head of the Security department, my boss, a few weeks ago.  He was of the opinion that if I wasn't able to recover 100% of my arm's strength and range of motion, he couldn't see authorizing my return to work.

I'm not in agreement with that.  Right now, every individual task that I routinely did at work before is something I feel I could do now (although some things, like locking and unlocking deadbolts located high up on doors, I'd have to do left-handed).  It's more an issue of stamina and pain levels.

On an aural-simile pain-scale, my default level of discomfort is currently like having a mosquito whining around your head; bothersome but ignorable.  If I use the arm much for a few hours, you get past discomfort into actual pain; then it's like fingernails scraping across a chalkboard.  (That's where that 2-hour limitation comes in.)  If I try and push myself further, you get into some pretty harsh pain territory, like working next to a woodchipper without earplugs.  At that point, you cannot think straight; that pain is a wet blanket over your brain, and you're not much use in either a domestic or workplace setting.  And the further I push myself, the longer it takes to recover.

THE ARTHURS AURAL-SIMILE PAIN SCALE

mosquito whine

fingernails on chalkboard

woodchipper

But I am improving, getting able to use the arm more and for longer periods.  (The process is just a lot slower than I wanted, or expected.)  So I feel that even if I don't recover the full range of motion for my right arm (and it looks like 85% is about the best I can hope for, barring having the surgery re-done), I'll still be able to perform everything I need to do at work.  I'm hoping my boss' attitude will turn out to have a flexible range of motion itself.  My intention has always been to stay in that job until I'm eligible for my full Social Security in about another six years. 


Photo credits:
mosquito: US Department oif Agriculture (via Wikimedia Commons)
fingernails on chalkboard: from tvtropes.org
woodchipper: from the movie Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil