Supersized Music

The local Musical Instrument Museum's latest email noted that their octobasse was one of the instruments used for the soundtrack to the forthcoming HUNGER GAMES movie. The octobasse is a bowed lute. If a regular lute is considered normal, then something like a bass cello would be a bowed lute on steroids. Which would make the octobasse the Incredible Hulk of lutes, because it's TWELVE FRIGGIN' FEET TALL!!! Here's a picture to show the scale:

The performer has to stand on a stool to play the octobasse, frets are done by a series of levers on the side of the instrument, and its lowest notes can be outside the normal range of human hearing.

What it most reminds me of, though, is something in comic books.  Not the Incredible Hulk, though that's a pretty apt simile, but Batman.

Yes, Batman.  Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, one of the comics memes that appeared frequently was Batman chasing and fighting crooks and villains in and around oversized, giant objects. 

For an extra thrill, you could always add in one of the semi-lame supporting characters from that same era, like Bat-Hound or Bat-Mite or that early version of Batwoman who clearly suffered from some form of color-blindness:

"Surrender, criminals, before
 I make you rip your own eyeballs out
 from an overload of garishness."

God, I am such a geek.

YouTube videos of the octobasse in action available here.

Clementine Abstract

Clementine Abstract, a photo by Bruce on Flickr.

Picking off the unwanted threads and veins from a clementine, I noticed they made an interesting abstract where I laid them on the leg of my jeans. My handy smart phone's camera function meant I could take the picture without having to move.

(Smart phones are addictive. I find myself using it more and more often, for more and more applications, than I ever expected to.)

Guinea Pig? The Family Discussion

Over at the latest Open Thread on Making Light, there's been a fair amount of discussion about having a guinea pig as a pet.  So I thought I'd sound out the household about the idea of having one.

That's right; I asked the cats!:

Me: "Hey, cats, how would you feel about having a guinea pig in the house?"

Sethra (long-haired prima donna): "No. And get rid of all the other cats, too. And feed me tuna. Only tuna."

Aliera (pre-confused shorthair): "Huh? What?" [long gaze into space] "I'm sorry, did you say something?"

Bastet (stodgy old overweight black cat): "Would its food be something I'd enjoy stealing?"

Cassie (professional lapcat): "Only one fluffy, adorable, sweet-tempered animal at a time, please."

Tyr (the new 6-month old Siamese): "A smaller fluffy animal that runs around on its own, without batteries? Wow! Great! Yeah! YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH!!! GUINEA PIG! GET ME A GUINEA PIG, RIGHT NOW-W-W-W-W-W!!!!"

Me: "That settles it. No guinea pigs."

More Changes

Now that I'm officially unemployed, part of the job-hunting experience is worrying about your personal appearance. I was due for a haircut anyway. But I looked at how far my hairline has receded as I've gotten older, and how thin the hair's getting, and decided "Maybe it's time to go really short."

So:

The last time I had a crewcut like this, I was about eight years old. That's half a century, plus a bit. So I expect people will be fairly surprised. Especially those who know that for most of my life I've worn my hair long and in a DFH ponytail.

posted from Bloggeroid

Living In The Grand Canyon/Copper/Valentine State

The "Copper Chopper", built for the Arizona Centennial.

"Happy Arizona Centennial Day!" is probably not the best thing to say to your wife on Valentine's Day morning.  Just sayin'.

My family moved to Arizona when I was about three years old, around 1955, and -- except for my 3-year stint in the Army -- I've lived here ever since.  So I've seen both the 50-year and now the 100-year anniversary of Arizona's statehood.  It may be simply because I've never known anything better, but I've always thought it's a pretty cool place to live.  (I do admit, though, that sometimes the attitudes and politics of the place lead me to think that -- after "The Valentine State"and "The Grand Canyon State" and "The Copper State" -- a good nickname for the place might be "WhatTheFuckizona".  Evan Mecham?  Really?  Jan Brewer?  Really?)

While I was in the Army, I spent some spare time embroidering the Arizona flag on a denim jacket.  Old-time fans might remember seeing it at some conventions.  I dragged it out of the back of the closet this morning for some photos:

close-up

Some grumpy old guy takes a break
 from chasing kids off the lawn to model the jacket.

The inside.  Back then I didn't know you were supposed to subdivide embroidery skeins
 into smaller, more manageable groups of threads, so the embroidery was done
 with the thread-bundles as they came off the skein. 
Getting that bunch of threads thru a needle was a bitch!

The "Copper Chopper" at the top of the post is something I saw on display during that fill-in shift at Cityscape I did a few months ago, so this is a dandy excuse to post a photo of it.  It was won in a raffle a few days ago by some young woman who's never had or ridden a motorcycle before.  Bikers everywhere are gnashing their bug-spattered teeth in frustration.

Forty Years Ago Today

I was doing a walking patrol at work in the early AM this morning, with jacket and ear mitts and gloves and knit cap on, thinking that if the weather got much colder in coming days I'd have to dig out my old woolen long underwear left from when I was in the Army.

And that was when I realized that exactly forty years ago was my first day of that three-year enlistment in the US Army.  January 23rd, 1972.

It was an interesting three years.  I had some of the best experiences of my life, and some of the worst.  All my service was at Stateside posts.  I never saw combat.  But there was one period when things got stressful enough I would have jumped at a chance to go to Vietnam rather than stay where I was.  (I got lucky, and ended up in a different company at the same post, with different people and doing a different job, and did pretty well the rest of my enlistment.)

The deep tint on my rose-colored glasses faded a lot during those three years.  I met a lot of good men, and some outstanding ones.  But it was also the first time in my life that I met, and lived and worked with, bad men, men who would probably have ended up in prison in civilian life.  Some of whom were in the Army because enlisting was offered as an alternative to prison, and a few who went to military prison in the end anyway.

But the worst was learning that... well, when I went into the Army it was with the belief that officers were the cream of the crop.  They were smarter and wiser and better trained for and more suited to leadership than us ordinary grunts.  And you know what?  Some of them were.  And then I learned, from harsh experience (this was part of that very bad period I mentioned above), that there were some officers who put the welfare of their careers ahead of the welfare of their men.  Hell, ahead of the lives of their men!  It was... disheartening.

But overall... overall, it was a positive experience.  I learned I had more strengths and abilities than I'd thought.  That was a good thing.  And I learned what some of my weaknesses were, and are.  And that was a good thing, too.

For years after getting back into civilian life, I had the thought in the back of my head that if things got rough in the real world, I could re-enlist in the military.  Sometimes that seemed like a tempting thought.  And then one day I found myself taken quite aback when I realized, "Holy crap, I'm too old to re-enlist anymore!"

(photo above from Library of Congress, via Flickr Commons)

Changes In The Works

For the last three years, I've been working as a security guard ("security officer" if you want to make it sound a little more important) during graveyard shifts at an upscale shopping/office development in Scottsdale.  The company I technically work for had a contract to provide security there, but for most of those three years the actual management of the development has said they intend to move to providing their own in-house security team "in a few months".

Much to almost everyone's surprise, that's actually going to finally happen, on February 5th.  Most of the current security personnel are being offered the opportunity to be hired on as part of the "new" security team, but a sizeable proportion (including me) have decided to pass on that offer and try to find new positions elsewhere. 

(At times over those three years, there have been issues with the workplace that have left me feeling very frustrated and unsatisified.  Particularly recently, and I'd already told my shift supervisor earlier this month that if things didn't change soon I'd be leaving.  The move to an in-house team isn't a move that will solve those problems, so....)

I'll probably be offered a position at one of the other properties my company has contracts with, but it may be a while before an opening becomes available.  So in the meantime, I'm already starting to send out resumes and applications to other companies and places.  With three-plus years experience and some good references, I should be able to land somewhere fairly soon.  It would also be nice to end up someplace with better pay and/or better hours and/or a shorter commute and/or a better working environment.

I'm also better off than some of the people who are leaving, because I have my retirement checks from the Postal Service and Hilde's disability that cover most of our monthly expenses.  So the idea of being without that extra paycheck for a while isn't as scary as it might be otherwise.


(No, I won't actually work for books.  But I'm willing to work for that extra paycheck that allows Hilde and me to buy books.  You can get the t-shirt that image comes from at the Unshelved store.)

Weird referring sites

One of the things Blogger Stats keeps track of is the "referring sites" where people can find links to various posts here.

One of the recent such was a hemorrhoid treatment site in France.  Say what?  To the best of my memory, I've never mentioned hemorrhoids here, ever.Or ever had any thoughts to write such a post.

But hey, if you have to mention hemorrhoids:

Writing: the middle is the beginning

More on my renewed efforts at writing.  Here's a brief excerpt from the current work-in-progress, tentatively titled "Alice In Zero":

"There are no wonders in this world," said the Zero King.

"Oh, sir," Alice replied.  "I believe you are much mistaken. I have met a cat that consumes itself in fire, and is born again. I have spoken with eagles, and they have spoken back. I have sailed with pirates on a sea of mirrors, and fished for the reflections of shadows. I have outplayed the Crooked Man with his own deck of cards, and won an Unbreakable Promise. And, sir, you yourself live in a palace carved from a unicorn's horn a full mile high."

 (Not, as is probably obvious, from the beginning of the story.  But sometimes you start writing from the middle, or the end, to know where the beginning will come from.  I know, now, where the beginning begins, and where the end will end.)

Resolutions

Like most people, any New Year's Resolutions I make tend to be better in concept than execution.

But the Ur-resolution, which would pretty much apply to any more specifc resolution I'd make, would be to try and become more organized and effective.  To Get Shit Done, Quicker.  Like, oh, writing and posting about New Year's Resolutions on January 1st, when it would be most pertinent.

Two specific goals I'd like to accomplish this year:

1. To get back into fiction writing.  I'm trying to write a little bit every day, hopefully several pages, but something, even if only a paragraph.  (So far, so good, on that.)
2. Get my backyard garden reestablished.  At present, it's devolved back into bare dirt, weeds, and grass.

One of the big time and energy commitments the past several years has been acting as personal representative (aka executor) for our friend Anne's estate.  That should finally be resolved and concluded by sometime in the spring, which will be a considerable relief. 

(Anne died without a will.  Write a friggin' will, people!  Don't make the whole mess of dying even messier for your family and friends.)

The Santorum Surge

In the last few days leading up to the Iowa presidential caucuses, candidate Rick Santorum has had a sudden surge in his support.  One news source accredited this to his "impeccable conservative credentials."  As a public service, I thought I'd translate that bit of Newspeak into plain English:

• "impeccable":  bat-shit crazy
• "conservative":  bat-shit crazy
• "credentials":  bat-shit crazy

You're welcome.

Christmas Connections

Sixty-nine years ago in 1942, these American soldiers in the South Pacific were celebrating a makeshift Christmas, with a "tree" decorated with bits of surgical cotton and cigarette cartons.

About that same time, my father would have been on a ship, also somewhere in the South Pacific.  He rarely spoke about his service in WWII, but I wonder if he and his shipmates would have tried to do something similar for their own Christmas celebration away from home.  (My mom once pointed ut to me that, since my dad's shipboard duty was running water purification systems that involved fire and steam and long pieces of pipe and tubing, he very likely knew how to make moonshine.  Not that he ever made any for us kids, to be sure....)

I don't know if any of the soldiers in the photo above died in WWII.  I know that my father saw combat, and saw shipmates die.  (He never talked about it.  Never.  But among his military mementoes were some photos of ships he had served on, and that were sunk in combat.)

Thirty-eight years later, my father would die on Christmas Day 1980.  That was not a good Christmas.

Shift to today, a family get together at a cousin's.  My mom and brothers, assorted cousins, with spouses and children and grandchildren. 

This was a good occasion, for the most part, but with an underlying bit of melancholy for me.  Seeing my family reminds me just how old we're all getting.  My brothers are all grey- or white-haired now.  My mother seems thinner and more frail every time I see her.  And the reason why so many more than usual of the relations got together this year was because the cousin who was hosting the party had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor several months ago.  (She's had surgery, and is undergoing chemo, and actually looks pretty good, considering.  But still, the chance that she'll be around for next year's Christmas is a lot less than it seemed four months ago.

I don't like this getting old.  It kinda sucks.

But then again, the youngest person there was a grand-niece, an oh-so-cute toddler with a head of curly hair so flamingly red it would make the entire Weasley clan gnash their teeth in envy.  Someone with a long life still ahead of her.  Someone to feel positive about.

Christmas Past, Christmas Present, Christmas Future.   Dickens got it right.

More Tyr



Tyr (15 weeks)

The new kitten is losing the fluffy and starting to grow into a cat.

Catbus

MY FRIEND TOTORO is a cool movie. But the coolest thing in it was the Catbus. Which is why I've had this sitting by my printer for several years:

Catbus

Cute and charming and whimsical.  Great fun.

BUT... in that alternate universe where Spock has a beard, the movie is titled MY FIEND TOTORO, and instead of the Catbus, you have...

SHARKBUS!

Well, that will certainly give one nightmares.  We need something to soothe our minds and let us sleep at night again.  We need something... even cuter and more charming and more whimsical than the Catbus.  But what could that be?  What could that possibly be?

There's only one thing cuter and more charming and more whimsical than a Catbus.   And that thing is...

Today In Headlines

 From the Phoenix New Times website:

This Cat Is Now Dead

Rikkus

I wrote about Rikkus earlier this year, in a post titled "This Cat Is Not Dead".  In that post, I mentioned Rikkus had been in poor health and we'd come close to having him put to sleep.  But I'd realized almost at the last minute that adjusting his thyroid medication might make him a little better again.

And it did, until just recently.  He gained back about a pound and a bit of weight.  Still very thin and frail, nothing like he'd been at his peak of health, when he'd been a stocky and robust cat who could hold his own against other cats.  But... okay.  He ate, he slept, he purred when he was petted.  He seemed to be okay with his life.

About a week ago, he stopped eating.  Completely.  He'd sometimes been picky about which flavor of canned food was being served him.  When all else failed, though, he'd always eat tuna.  Not that nasty, smelly, reddish cat food tuna made from scraps and ends, but the good stuff, the Human's Tuna.  He'd never turn that down.

Except now he even turned away from the good tuna.  I hoped maybe he'd get his appetite back in a few days, and offered him bites of various cat food flavors several times each day.  But he showed no interest, and it became clear that he wasn't just sick, he was getting ready to die.

He never seemed in distress or pain.  He was just... waiting.  Occasionally he'd totter over to the water bowl and get a few licks of water, but that was all.  He still purred when he was petted.  That pound of weight he'd regained went away, and more.  He was growing visibly weaker.  He still purred faintly when I stroked him about 10:00 this morning, but it was clear the end was near.  When I woke up about 1:30 this afternoon, he'd finally passed away sometime in those few hours.

We gave him a few extra years by taking him in when his previous owners abandoned him and moved away.  We gave him a few extra months when we adjusted his medications earlier this year.  He was never a snuggler or a lap cat.  But he was a good old guy.  I liked him, and I'm going to miss him.

At TusCon

TusCon, where we went last weekend, is a small but friendly SF convention held each year in, duh, Tucson. We tend to see and catch up with old friends there.


This is Curt Stubbs, from back in the way early days (the 70's) of Phoenix fandom. Curt moved to Tucson in the 80's. Besides the latest year's worth of medical problems to report, Curt had the better news that he'd been working on poetry again, and had read a piece on local radio.

He also has an awesome beard, the bastard. (Not that I'm BITTER, y'know, or OBSESSIVE, y'know, about having to stay clean-shaven for work the last few years.)


We also saw Jennifer Roberson again for the first time in a few years. Jennifer had moved to Tucson since we'd last spoke, and was multitasking, hitting both TusCon in her career as an SF/Fantasy writer, and a major dog show in her capacity as a Corgi breeder.  This is Jennifer with Gabby, one of her newest Corgis:


Gabby was named after Gabrielle Giffords, being born a week after the shooting last January.  In evidence that Everything Is Connected, Curt had been in hospital (a MRSA infection in his foot) the day of the shooting, and was one of the ICU patients hurriedly transferred to a regular ward to make room for some of the shooting victims.

We also saw Tom Watson, for the first time in about twenty years, at TusCon.  Tom had been one of the members of a writers' workshop back in the 80's, along with Jennifer, Hilde and me, Mike Stackpole, and Liz Danforth.  He's gotten back to writing again (unemployment can do that to you), which is good.   (Tom was, I think, the member of the workshop who was actually making the steadiest income from writing at the time, but it was non-fiction for pet industry trade journals.)

I was struck, at TusCon, both by how many young people (late teens, early 20's) were in attendance, and by how our own generation of fans is (phrasing it politely) "greying".  Curt was using a walker, Jim Webbert was using a walker, and Jan Lockett was not only using a walker but had a litany of health issues and crisises from this last year that had us amazed she was still alive.  (She actually came to the convention from the rehab hospital where she's still recovering from the latest crisis.)  Made Hilde and me feel we've been pretty lucky this last year.  (Although the con suite had a large mirror on one wall, and I kept being taken aback when I kept seeing an Old Guy looking back at me whenever my eyes drifted in that direction.)

First Look: Tyr

After Gremlin's death earlier this year, we started looking into the possibility of getting another Siamese. So we stopped in Casa Grande on our way to TusCon Friday where the very nice woman who operates Siam Moon Cattery showed us her newest purchase-ready litter. We'd already seen photos of the litter's kittens online, so our stop was to decide which of the two male Sealpoints we would pick. This little guy turned out to be the one; we picked him up Sunday on our way home. We've already named him Tyr.

posted from Bloggeroid

My Downtown Adventure

I got asked last weekend to do a fill-in shift at a different property from where I usually do Security work. So I ended up working Saturday afternoon and evening at Cityscape, a fancy new office & shopping development smack in the heart of downtown Phoenix.

(I usually try to avoid extra shifts, but the Security Director at Cityscape had been an easy-to-get-along-with Acting Director at my workplace for a while, and someone walking out on him at Cityscape without warning put him in a bind to fill the shift.  So, hey.) (The extra pay will also make up for the day's work I lost to my concussion-based ER visit a few weeks ago.)

Cityscape is very spiffy and upscale, part of the ongoing effort to refurbish and reinvigorate downtown Phoenix, which used to have the reputation for having no life beyond office workers at all, and for being dead, dead, deader-than-dead at night and on weekends.  At some of the early Phoenix SF conventions that were held at downtown hotels in the 1980's, the convention attendees pretty much had the downtown sidewalks to themselves for the weekend.  Definitely more lively now than then, though a large part of this is from the sports venues built downtown (basketball arena and baseball stadium), which definitely aren't my cup of tea.

But what actually piqued my interest the most working downtown was finding that Cityscape was built directly across the street from the Luhrs Tower.

The Luhrs Tower is a fabulous Art Deco building, one of the first skyscrapers built in Phoenix, back in 1929.  Here's an article on its history, and here's a photo:

Every time I've seen the Luhrs Tower, I've said to myself, "Cool.  Very, very cool."  At Cityscape, I saw the upper stories of the Luhrs showing themselves behind a section of the Cityscape structures.  I would have liked to have taken a photo from that viewpoint, because it would have contrasted the ornate richness of the Luhrs Tower with the relative blandness of Cityscape's buildings.  (They may be new, they may be spiffy and clean, but Cityscape, when you come down to it, is just another set of buildings from the "steel-&-glass" school of architecture.  Meh.)

(A photo of Cityscape is included in the set of High Dynamic Range photos of downtown Phoenix buildings where I found the Luhrs photo above.  Full article here.)

Unfortunately, even though I have a semi-adequate camera built into my cell phone, Cityscape is yet another place with one of those bothersome "no photography" policies.  And I didn't think it would be ethical to violate that policy while I was in uniform and supposed to be enforcing it.

(I like the part of Security work where I'm doing good deeds, helping people out, solving problems.  But part of the job sometimes feels like being a High School Hall Monitor, enforcing policies and rules that mostly just annoy people.  But the "no photography" rule is the one that has me scratching my head in puzzlement the most.  The developers spend millions and millions of dollars trying to make their properties photogenic, and then they say "no photos"?  Since I usually work graveyard shifts, I don't have to do it too often, but when I have to ask someone to not take or to stop taking photos, I feel embarassed and stupid.)

Welcome To The Wonderful World Of Concussion

I said hello to The Wonderful World Of Concussion yesterday afternoon, spending an evening in the ER.

When I slipped on the wet floor ("Incontinent Dog" will be the name of my next rock band*), I at first thought I'd only landed on my butt, which hurt a lot. But my head felt like it should be puffy and swollen on the left side, only it wasn't; but it felt like it was. And the lights seemed bright, a lot brighter than normal. And my thinking was foggy and slow.

All that (wrong signals from the nervous system, overly bright lights, half-speed thinking) made me think (slowly) that I might have hit my head in the fall too. But I didn't remember hitting my head, which was yet another reason to worry.

So I had one of our housemates drive me over to the Mayo Hospital ER. (We have another hospital and ER less than a mile from our house, but my primary doctor is with Mayo, plus Mayo's ER has a lot less traffic and can usually get you in and out in a few hours, whereas the closer hospital usually has a minimum wait time of about eight hours. The ten-mile difference is worth it.)

While waiting for examination and a cat scan, it was interesting to see how my mind was working. Idle thoughts, "daydreaming", were much more like actual night dreams, going off in odd little unexpected directions. The name "Esme Savage" popped into my mind at one point, for absolutely unknown reasons; it'd be a good character name for a story, though, so I might use it someday.

Cat scan came out okay, so I got diagnosed with a mild concussion and basically told to take it easy for a few days. Called off from work, slept quite a bit last night. Doing better today.

*(I'm growing increasingly frustrated by our dog's bladder problems, which have been going on for months and have had only temporary abatements with antibiotics and other medications. The latest round of antibiotics seemed to be helping again, but in the last few days... twice more just today. I'm about ready to scream. At the veterinarian, not the dog.)

Fashion Captain

Occupy Phoenix, 10/15/2011

I wasn't able to make it to the Occupy Phoenix event yesterday, but Flickr member Ronald Morrison posted a large photo-set at Flickr.  With permission, some of his photos below:

 

 

Full set of Morrison's Occupy Phoenix photos here.  Looks like it was a pretty peaceful event.  Well, yeah, but then there were these jerks:

These are some of the "Border Guards" group who showed up, ostensibly to "protect everyone".  Yeah, right.  You not only show up with semi-automatic weapons at a protest that specifically emphasizes non-violence, you bring your friggin' pit bull with you?  Give me a break.

What these guys show up for isn't protection or protest.  They show up for intimidation.  They show up because it's fun to make people nervous, it's fun to make people afraid. They show up to display their manly macho manliness.  They show up because it makes their little tiny dicks hard. 

Those aren't military uniforms they're wearing.  Those are fetish costumes.  They couldn't be more obvious if they were wearing ballgags, leather harnesses, and butt plugs.

Go back to to the border, so-called Border Guards.  You're over a hundred miles off-course.  But then, that's pretty much a description of your entire life, isn't it?

UPDATE:  After posting the above, I found an updated timeline for Occupy Phoenix at Downtown Devil .  Apparently police moved in late last night and arrested about 40 protesters who were refusing to leave Hance Park.  One person pepper-sprayed, but overall still seems to have been mostly non-violent.

Recent Cell-Phone Photos

Sethra, in bean-bag mode:




Mineral deposits on the side of a commercial A/C unit.  ("Hard water?  We gotcher hard water right here!"):

posted from Bloggeroid

More for Halloween: Benefactor Cellars

Seen in the wine aisle at the local Trader Joe's:

And more, for those who want to get boozed up at Halloween.  For beer enthusiasts, Reaper Ale puts out an entire line of rigorously brewed beers:

And in the hard liquor line, there's always this good old standby:

Halloween Should Be Scary, Dammit!

I've always felt that Halloween should be a scary holiday.  Apparently there are those who think "gross" is close enough:

I say no.

(Googling, I find that the Flix Candy company has actually been offering the "Box of Boogers" as a Halloween offering for several years.  At least they've changed the packaging to remove the word "Fresh!")

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011



(1955?  Jeezus, he was younger than I am!)

A Wedding Cake As Writing. Writing As A Wedding Cake

From My Madeleine, Molly Birnbaum's excellent food-and-writing blog:

I thought about this a lot last weekend. Because as I baked my first wedding cake, I was in the middle of writing my book. I was buried in outlines and research; I had no idea where it would go. Back then, it was all about the creativity. It was all about forging new paths ahead. I was living in a miniscule studio in Brooklyn, had a boyfriend fighting a war in Afghanistan, and was using 14 pounds of almond paste to create a wedding cake in my mother’s kitchen with nothing but a couple recipes and a half-baked plan. If I could make and transport that cake, then of course I could finish my book. It was all about magical thinking. What surprised me is that it worked.

(I'm still having trouble getting links in Blogger to work right now. URL for the full piece: http://mollysmadeleine.blogspot.com/2011/08/wedding-cake-ii.html )

If I Ever Ride In A Hot Air Balloon...

...I want it to be this one.

(from a September 2010 balloon festival in Boise, Idaho.  Found via one of those Drunkard's-Walk searches on Flickr and Google Images at http://www.boisedailyphoto.com/2010/09/fly-me-to-moon.html , which won't link for some reason.  Photo by Debbie Courson Smith. )

Hellbox: Towards An Alternate Definition

The word "hellbox" popped into my mind a few nights ago.  At the office/shopping development where I work security, a large company is setting up their new HQ on most of two floors on one building's office levels.  Part of my rounds has been to check the floors, so I've watched the development of the space from bare open concrete to where it's only a few weeks from having employees report to their new workplace.  Most recently has been the delivery and set-up of several hundred cubicles and workstations.

The sight of all those identical cubicles raises my hackles and crottles my greeps.  It's cookie-cutter, assembly-line workspaces, interchangeable, and my impression is that it's all meant for cookie-cutter employees, also interchangeable.  That, to me, is Hell.  And so a work cubicle is a "hellbox".

It turns out, though, that "hellbox" already exists as a word.  It's from the printing profession, back when set type was taken out of the printing forms and tossed into a box, which some junior apprentice was damned to sort back into each letter's individual slot in the typecases.  It's also used in a more general sense, of a container filled with a miscellany of small items difficult to sort apart.

But I like my own use of the word, to mean an office work cubicle, particularly when it's one of a large number of identical cubicles.  So I'm tossing it out there into the wilds of the Internet, where one hopes kind-hearted strangers will pick it up and give it a good home.

(How large is "a large number"?  The hellishness of cubicles seems to increase, at least in my mind, the larger the number of cubicles grouped together.  Some of the smaller companies, in the other office buildings, have smaller groups of cubicles, and those don't particularly bother me.  Four cubicles together, no problem.  Eight, well, okay.  Twelve, that's starting to push my buttons.  But forty or fifty or sixty in a group, like in that new HQ?  Ewwwww......)

The Mercury Men on SyFy



Say what you will about SyFy Channel's crappy "reality" shows like GHOST HUNTERS, their Turkey-of-the-Week original movies ("TURKEYSAURUS!" That's not a real title, but please don't anyone suggest it to SyFy executives!), or, God help us all, wrestling, they have occasional shows (EUREKA and WAREHOUSE 13) that are amusing and entertaining, if rather on the dumb side. ALPHAS, a little more adult in tone, got off to a slow start, but it's been growing on me.

But the best show on SyFy isn't on TV. It's a web series called THE MERCURY MEN, 10 short episodes that evoke not only the feel of old movie cliffhangers, but show a strong influence by the original black-&amwhite episodes of THE OUTER LIMITS from the 1960's. Not just in the cinematography and special effects, but in the feeling of paranoia and entrapment that was so common in those old TOL episodes.

Official website, with links to episodes, here.

Cold Comix Turkey

I bought and read a number of comic books while growing up.  (And had to sneak them into the house past my Mom, who thought they were the next-worst thing to porn.)  Quit when I started college, and didn't start again until 1985, when the bookstore Hilde and I frequented added a comics section and several titles caught my eye.  (WATCHMEN and the Ted Kord version of BLUE BEETLE, in particular.)  I've continued since then, usually buying 3-4 titles per week.  That bookstore went under, eventually, but I continued buying comics, now at comics specialty shops, and have been shopping at the same vendor for over fifteen years.

DC Comics announced a few months ago that they would be relaunching their comics line, with new #1 issues of 52 different titles.  The stated purpose of this was to give a new generation of readers a jumping on point to start reading comics.

But this also meant that a bunch of the old titles were suddenly cancelled in mid-storylines.  That hasn't made the old generation of readers happy.  The last conversation I had with David, the owner of the comics shop I shopped at, I said, "This could just as easily be a jumping off point for the current readers."   He told me that a number of his customers had already cancelled their standing orders for DC titles.

Another reason for DC's relaunch was to start promoting increased digital sales of comics, rather than the old-fashioned paper-and-ink versions.  Not good news for comics shops owners.

David's shop had already been hanging on by its fingertips, with a lot of customers cutting back or stopping completely in the wake of the general economy's weakening in the last several years.  When you cut back on non-essential spending, things like books or movies or comics are among the first to be cut.  He'd come close to losing the shop about a year before, only staying open when he'd been able to renegotiate the shop's lease at the last minute.

So I wasn't too surprised when I went back a few weeks later to find the store's lights out, the doors locked, and a notice from the landlord taped to the door.  (Man, that's gotta hurt for David.  He's started working for the store's original owners as a teenager, then bought the store from them about ten years ago.  Hopefully nearly twenty years of retail experience will let him find another source of income soon.)

So there I was, suddenly cut off from my usual source of comics.  (There are other comics shops, but all considerably farther away and in the wrong direction from my usual travel patterns; David's shop was less than a mile away.) What to do?

What I've done is... nothing.

I have to admit that I've thought for a long time that the cost-to-benefit ratio of buying comics is a negative one.  I can buy a comic that costs $3 or (usually) more, and get ten or fifteen minutes reading pleasure from it.  Or I can buy a paperback novel for about $8 and get hours of reading from it.  (When I bought my very first comics, as a kid, they were still twelve cents apiece; they've increased in cost 25-fold.  My first paperbacks, a couple of years later, averaged sixty cents; they've only risen 12 to 13-fold since then.)(Yes, I'm old.)  I've kept up the habit of buying occasional comics mostly from... habit.

So I've gone cold turkey on comics.  So far I haven't missed many of the titles I was following all that much.  And I'm saving about $40 to $50 a month in expenses.

(The one title I've missed the most has been T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, one of the titles cancelled by DC in their relaunch.  It's been an interesting update to the original series from the 1960's, with some unexpected twists.  Googling for this post, however, it seems enough people objected to losing that particular title and story arc that DC may put it back into production in a few months.  I'll have to think about that one....)

(I also wanted to note that the relaunch of Superman reportedly involves some changes to his costume; it's now going to be a type of "Kryptonian battle armor".  Say what?  I say, "Bullshit!" to that.  Everyone knows -- KNOWS -- that Supe's costume was made by Ma Kent unravelling the blankets that swaddled Kal-El inside that rocket and weaving the uniform from those threads.  These are immutable truths about Superman:  He can fly.  He has super-strength.  He's invulnerable.  And his mother dresses him funny.)

Fuzzy Thinking

The first panel Hilde and I did at CopperCon was on H. Beam Piper.  The programmer for CopperCon wanted to have some panels on good writers of previous generations, and we suggested Piper because John Scalzi's recent "revamp", FUZZY NATION, of Piper's first book in the Fuzzy series, LITTLE FUZZY, had brought some attention back to Piper's work.  Small audience, about half a dozen, but it seemed to go well and stayed on track.


My take on FUZZY NATION:  This is the novelization of the screenplay for the Hollywood adaptation of LITTLE FUZZY.

Keeping in mind that Scalzi is a long-time film buff & critic, the changes he's wrought from the original novel seem very much to be changes that would be made for a film adaptation of Piper's novel:  The protagonist is younger, with a romantic sub-plot.  His version of Jack Holloway is also a bit of a scoundrel, whose motivations aren't always noble.  Scalzi's narrative flow is faster, with leaner dialogue.

(Skimming back thru the original LITTLE FUZZY, I noticed that there's a lot of talking in Piper's book, a lot of discussion of what sapience is and how it might be detected.)

Significant parts of both books take place in courtrooms.  I think Piper's original wins out here; his presentation of courtroom wrangling is larger and messier than Scalzi's; it's more complicated, with more factors and players involved.  In short, more realistic.

One of the elements in LITLE FUZZY was the veradicator, a lie-detector with 100% accuracy, used in courtroom testimony.   Much as I love the idea of a veradicator (I want one, dammit!), Piper's machine only give a postiive or negative response; there's no gray areas of half-truths or delusional thinking allowed to it.  That was never realistic (dammit!  I still want one), and Scalzi leaves the veradicator out of his version.  A good change, I'm inclined to think, on Scalzi's part.

[spoilers below the break...]

Hilton Garden Inn gets it right

The Hilton Garden Inn in Avondale, Arizona, where we're staying for CopperCon, has one of the best wheelchair-accessible rooms we've ever stayed in. Some hotels think putting a grab-bar on the wall above a tub equals "accessible". No, it doesn't.

Wide traffic paths and doors, and things like a roll-in shower stall, that's accessible. Thanks, Hilton!

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