A little music to pass the time until I write a real post.

I've had a number of posts I've wanted to write in recent weeks, but have been extraordinarily busy (and "ordinarily busy" is already pretty hectic). Maybe later.

In the meantime, a little music. Hilde and I first heard "Concerto Antico" on our local classical station, KBAQ, while driving to a doctor's appointment, and liked it enough to check the station's playlist after we got home and identify the work. This YouTube video of the work's first section also coordinates music and images nicely. Enjoy.

Nouveau Robotica

Artist Chris Kawagiwa has been producing a very cool series of "Nouveau Robotica" works. Think of them as high-tech Mucha.

Gallery of the full set can be found here.

Nothing To Do With Today's News, Nope.

A Tea Partier went to the movie theater.

He didn't like the movie. So he shouted, "THIS MOVIE SUCKS! SOMEONE SHOULD BURN THIS THEATER DOWN!"

But nobody burned the theater down. A week later the Tea Partier went back to the theater and watched a different movie.

He didn't like that movie either. So he shouted, "THIS MOVIE SUCKS! SOMEONE SHOULD BURN THIS THEATER DOWN!" again.

But nobody burned the theater down. So he kept going back to watch other movies. He was a pretty crabby old guy -- he'd yell "Get off my lawn, you spic!" at the guy he'd hired off a street corner to mow his lawn, that's how crabby he was -- and since John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were both dead, there weren't really any movies he liked anymore, so every time he went to the theater. . . "THIS MOVIE SUCKS! SOMEONE SHOULD BURN THIS THEATER DOWN!"

Then one day he went to the theater, only to find the parking lot crowded with police cars and ambulances, and a line of blanket-covered corpses laid out on the asphalt. The theater building was in flames, its walls collapsing inward, showers of sparks climbing into the sky.

Someone had burned the theater down.

"Oh, my god! This is horrible! Horrible!" the Tea Partier cried in anguish. "Now I have to find a different theater to go to!"

It's 2011

Still no jetpack, dammit.

2010 passed away quietly at midnight, and 2011 snuck into the room just as quietly.

This in spite of some varieties of fireworks having been made legal in the State of Arizona, and Glendale being one of the few cities that didn't institute their own local ban in response.  (Glendale allows them, but only on private property.)  Probably because the varieties allowed are only the sissy-foo-foo types that sit on the ground and shoot off a feeble shower of sparks.  Because what good are fireworks if you can't use them to blow a few fingers off or an eye out, or set an entire neighborhood ablaze?

My resolutions?  Pretty much the same as previous years.  Lose weight, reduce debt, try to write more.

I'm actually pretty good at reducing debt.  It's just that by the time I've reduced the old debt, new debt has come along.  Besides recovering from the cash-flow imbalance while off work these last few months, and the medical costs that weren't covered by insurance, it looks like we'll have some major dental expenses to deal with in 2011.  (My insurance is generally pretty good -- it's paid about 90% of the cost for shoulder surgery and the subsequent physical therapy -- but the dental coverage is feeble.)

As for the writing:  I have no idea if I'm going to write fiction again.  It's been over four years since my last completed story (there have been ocasional fragments since then), and that was a story far too autobiographical and not safe to market until at least several people have passed away.  The drive, the at-least-occasional fire in the mind that produced earlier stories, doesn't seem to be there anymore.  (Possibly it was because I finally wrote that too-autobiographical story, which I'd been wanting to do -- and skittering away from -- for thirty years.)  If I write fiction again, it will be by means of perspiration, rather than the mostly-inspiration stories I've done until now.  Craft, rather than art.  (Am I a craftsman?  I don't know.)

In the meantime, I've put together a bibliography of my published fiction.  There's a new link to that page over in the sidebar.  Rather slight, for that long a time, but there are stories in that list I'm proud of, so hey.

And there are stories I wrote before that last one, good enough I should try to get them out to markets again; I think they'd sell, if they just hit the right editor at the right time.  There are a few that don't seem to be marketable, or marketable enough; I might go ahead and put them online here.

And I'll continue to post here with the occasional comment or news, of course, leavened appropriately with snark or outrage. Bcause I am snarkish and outrageous, that's why.

Christmas Snowpocalypse -- the view from sunny Arizona

Here in Arizona, I had to brave temperatures in the 70's while running errands earlier today.  Life is tough.

But I've been looking at pictures from the big blizzard that's been dumping snow on the Northeast states.  That's some pretty cold-looking stuff you got there, people!

A photo gallery at Talking Points Memo led me to Dan Nguyen's Flickr set from New York City, which has some particularly nice shots.  This is my favorite, of Union Square:



Union Square - New York Snowstorm Blizzard 2010

 I like the sense of calm in this photo, at a location that would normally be filled with traffic moving in all directions.  The emptiness of the vista, the lack of vehicles and the wonderful old buildings (the snow-haze gives the buildings a layered effect not unlike that seen in Chinese mountain landscapes), make it almost seem like one has dropped a century back in time.  (Just put your thumb over that McDonald's sneaking in on the left edge.)

UPDATE: Here are a few more outstanding photos I've found on Flickr.  One that could be titled "New Yorkers Are Crazy" by O62, and a lovely self-portrait with snow by esparist.

One Word

Via Jay Lake, Daniel Abraham is having a discussion on story vs. sentence in fiction over on his Live Journal blog; Part of the discussion has been about how a story can change when the choice of words is changed.

As it happens, I can give an example where one word, being changed, changed a story:

One of my own stories, "Angel's Blood", published in Heaven Sent (ed. by Pete Crowther, DAW [US] and Signet Creed [UK] 1995).

The Big Reveal in that story came in the following sentence:

"There is war in Heaven, and God is losing."

For whatever reason (it showed up in the galleys without explanation), Crowther decided to change that to this:

"There is war in Heaven, and the angels are losing."

I think that both versions are effective stories. But they're not the same story.

- - - - -

In that same discussion, Daniel brought up the loss of accessibility to written language over time, as the language of later generations changes in usage and meaning, gaining new vocabulary as well as losing the old.  Chaucer and Shakespeare were brought up as examples (outliers?) whose work is still read today because of their sheer strength of story, rather than their now-difficult language.

Language-change is only part of that, however.  Culture as a whole changes over time.  So there's less and less overlap between the culture of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time and that of a reader fifity or a hundred or five hundrd years removed.  The context is lost.

So, in the context (*ahem*) of reading classical literature, to better understand that literature one needs to learn at least some of the historical context.  For that, things like annotated editions are useful.  But then your understanding of that context is dependent on the understanding and style (their own word-choices) of the annotations' author.  So ideally, the author of such an annotation would be a capable historian, linguist, archaeologist, anthropologist AND author.  And even then, your own brain is getting only a second-generation xerox of that author's understanding.

So it shouldn't really be a surprise that "popular culture" is, well, popular.  There's a "common context" that the reader can share, being a resident of the same culture the author of a modern work lives in.  The context of a work of classical fiction has become an uncommon context.

I think this may be why "historical mysteries" are popular.  The context of the historical period used for the mystery may be uncommon, but the meta-elements of mystery and detective fiction are part of the "common context" an average reader will be familiar with.  That gives the reader sufficient grounding in a work to give the author a chance to present the historical and cultural context clearly enough to give the reader a grounding in that aspect as well.

Conversely, even in a modern work, context can be relative. Why is fiction from other countries rarely popular in the US? I suspect it's because the cultural context is different enough to become part of the "uncommon context" I've mentioned above. Off the top of my head, it seems that the further away from the US (or the UK) a work of fiction originates, the less likely it is to gain a readership here.

And this can even apply to modern works supposedly set in a culture common to the average reader.  Back in my early 20's, I found myself reading Roommates by Elsie Lee.  Lee was a romance writer whose readership overlapped to some extent with SF readers.  (I think I first saw her work mentioned by Juanita Coulson in YANDRO, though I may be misremembering.)  At any rate, I came across and read the book.

I'm pretty sure I was not the audience for that book.  I was a young, socially awkward, inexperienced (worrying about getting laid wasn't a big concern back then; my state of general despair was more about just getting a date!).   And when I read Roommates, I was pretty thoroughly aghastified.  The lead characters in Roommates were... "husband-hunters" is the best term I can come up with.  To become someone's wife was the #1 goal in their lives.

I didn't have the context to understand those characters, or to sympathize with them.  To me, Roommates wasn't a romance novel, it was a horror novel.

(The website where I found the cover image, Fantastic Fiction, also quoted the backcover blurb to Roommates: "They were roommates happily sharing expenses and men, secrets and strategies, until they discovered the real meaning of womanhood--and love."  And underneath that was a "Similar Works By Other Authors" section.  The work cited as similar was Oath Of Fealty, by Elizabth Moon.   Wait, what?)

On the Subject of Beards, With Visual Aids

I'll be going back to work in early January, having recovered from shoulder surgery sufficiently. Which means I'll have to once again shave off the beard I've been growing back these last few months, and which I prefer to have.

A lot of people have said I look younger without the beard. I think they're wrong, but it's actually a matter of how good you look, not how young you look. Here's a piece of evidence to that effect:


The Most Interesting Man In The World

 Not convinced?  Okay, how about this?





with beard





without beard



I trust I've made my point.

Naughty or Nice?

Moonwalking Zombies of 1921



found on MagazineArt.org



A Questionable Christmas

Every Christmas season, there come along various seasonal items that make you stop short and say, "What?  Really?"  Here's a couple.  (I'll probably add more as I come across them.)

From the Toscano catalog, the Christmas Yeti ornament:

And from a Park Seed email, something to do with those overgrown, woody okra pods from your garden:

Every nativity needs a dragon, doesn't it?

You might think someone thinks dragons are just too damn cute to leave out of a Nativity.  But this particular setup was put together by someone basing it on the Book of Revelations, rather than the earlier parts of the New Testament.  That sounds like a fun family to be part of.

The Paris Exhibition on Flickr

I've been reading The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt.  Very good book, but I was especially struck by the section set in and during the Paris Exhibition of 1900 (think World's Fair), with lush descriptions of the buildings and exhibits.

Thought to take a look on the Flickr Commons pages to see if there were photos from the Exhibition.  Turned out there was not only a set of photos, it was a big set (271 photos), and they were even in color! (Hand-colored, but still....)

The full set here.

Two-Fer Teapots!

I occasionally browse around for teapot competitions online.  These are usually for ceramic artists, working within the constraints of teapot design; sometimes those constraints are stretched way-y-y-y beyond what one expects, and the results can be astonishing.

Saddleback College in California has an annual competition along those lines, and past years have produced fine work.  Alas, for 2010, Saddleback decided that rather than a gallery with individual photos of each entry, they'd only post a PDF of the winning entries and honorable mentions.

But wait!  Browsing a bit more, I came across this gallery from a teapot-themed competition/benefit-auction held by the AAW.  That's the American Association of Woodturners.  All those teapots are made of wood (or wood-like materials; one is made from corrugated cardboard).  Woodworking is another area of interest to me, so, hey!, I get two-for-one pleasure from these.  Here are several examples:

Some or most of the AAW teapots are purely decorative (I'd imagine you'd need to coat the interior with a food-safe varnish or polyurethane to actually brew tea in them).  Some are more than obvious about being purely art pieces, like this one, and especially this delicate little number.

And then there's the piece shown below, by artist Binh Pho, made of maple and decorated with glass beads, pearls, and 14k gold; detail photo here:

Yowsa!

Latest LOL

Gary Farber reminds us that there aren't enough cats on the Internet. So:

The Way To A King's Stomach?

Browsing the selections over at the Science Fiction Book Club, a two-book combo selection popped up:



The Way of Kings/Best of the Year Cookbook Recipes



O-kayyyyyy....  

I'm scratching my head, wondering how someone made the decision that a Big Fat Fantasy and a recipe collection have sufficient appeal to each other's audience to be offered as a set?

Publishers work in mysterious ways....



Look, Ma! No Sling!

I had my first follow-up appointment with my shoulder surgeon on Monday. The good news is that he told me to start leaving the sling off my arm.

The bad news is he thought I should have a better range of motion at this point, so he wanted the sling dumped to let the arm move around more and get more flexible.

Yes, I have been wearing the sling pretty much 24/7 since the surgery, because that's what I was told to do. The first month following surgery, other than the passive therapy when the therapist moves the arm around while I try to keep it limp, was supposed to give the incision a chance to heal, and not to stress the sutures and repairs to the rotator cuff.

But the second month (as in, now) is when I'm supposed to get more active with the arm, including home-based exercises to stretch the shoulder as well as more-physical appointments with the PT people.

I'm kinda happy to have the sling off. "Kinda", because I still have to be careful not to overextend or overuse the left arm, and because it does ache some just from being out loose. But I can use that arm a bit more than before, with care, and I appreciate that. (Typing one-handed has been, umm, dreary.)

The stretching exercises started today. I figured they'd probably hurt. I was right. (I was saying "Owch! Owch! Oooch! Owch!" when another patient in another room gave a sharp, loud scream from thir own therapy. "Hey, someone's having a worse day than I am," I said. It's very, very bad of me, but that made me feel a bit better about the whole thing.)

Besides the appointments for physical therapy, I'm supposed to do the stretching exercises at home two or three times a day, using a stick and a set of pulleys to help push and pull the arm past it's comfort zone and into larger extensions. This hurts, too, but it does help get the range of motion slowly back to normal. (Right now I can only raise that left arm up to about shoulder level without an assist from the stick or pulleys. That's not sufficient, so I need to do the exercises, regardless of how much they hurt.)

After a month of stretching and extending the range of motion, the third month will be when I start working on getting that arm's strength back, because between not being able to use it fully before the surgery and not being able to use it pretty much at all since the surgery, the strength on that arm is pretty much punked out. Something tells me that's probably going to hurt too.

New Face, Same As The Old Face

I've complained before (bitterly, with much rending of sackcloth and angst-ridden wandering about fog-shrouded moors) about having had to shave off my beard -- my awesome, AWESOME beard! -- when I hired on as a security guard a few years ago.

Being off work for the next several months following the rotator cuff surgery, I've taken the opportunity to let the beard grow back.  After four weeks, we're at this stage:


Past the skeazy-bum stage and starting to fill in nicely.  Could even use a light trim on the lower edge of the moustache.  This is much more what my real face looks like.

Sure is grumpy lookin', though, isn't he?  That's probably because I know I'll have to shave it all off again in a few months.

Cacoeidechthineologism* of the Day

In the news: the word "refudiate", coined (or perhaps "misstruck" is the appropriate word) by Sarah Palin in a Twitter post, has been chosen as the new "word of the year" to be included in the latest edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary.

Divorced from its source, the word refudiate isn't all the worst neologism ever. But it's not all that good, either. It's a pretty simple and obvious cojoining of two words into one, but doesn't really add any new nuance or meaning to the original words. If someone coined it deliberately, I'd give them a C- grade.

The question is whether this was a neologism -- the coining of a new word -- by Sarah Palin (whose rhetorical skills are, shall we say in the politest of tones, rudimentary), or simply a malapropism -- a garbling of either "refute" or "repudiate". If the latter, should points be taken off and the grade lowered?

(Data point: When it was pointed out that "refudiate" was a non-existent word, Palin revised her Twitter post to replace "refudiate" with "refute"... which was an inaccurate use of that word.)

In any event, when there are so many more creative and useful neologisms around, I find the OAD choosing "refudiate" above other, better, words to be utterly indenstible.


*"cacoeidechthineologism" comes from here

Killing Mrs. Kimble -- life as a one-armed man

Three weeks since my rotator cuff surgery, and my left arm into a sling for almost 24/7 over the next few months.

The goal of keeping the arm immobilized is to let the torn end of the rotator cuff tissue grow a firm reattachment to the bone it's been screwed and tacked to. This takes a while, and putting stress on or trying to use those shoulder muscles too early runs the risk of tearing those fresh connections loose and resetting everything to zero.

In one regard, I'm glad for the sling. Its presence requires me to be aware of my surroundings, and try to NOT use that shoulder. Not just to let it heal, but because moving it too far friggin' hurts.

It's difficult to remember to just let the arm hang and be supported by the sling. My natural bent is to keep my arms slightly tensed and ready to move around. When the arm aches, it also tends to make me tense up the mucles on that side.

So I've been trying to keep pain meds balanced to where I don't ache too much, but also not so doped up that I'm fuzzy-headed. Mostly large doses of Tylenol, backed up with occasional Vicodan. Works fairly well, except for sleeping.

I've found that a Vicodan with the usual bedtime pills lets me get to sleep fairly easily, but that I tend to wake up after about four hours. Having laid flat on my back all that time (I usually shift around while sleeping,mostly on my side), the shoulder has stiffened up and is now really really aching. Even with extra pain meds, it's difficult to get back to sleep and I frequently lay there for hours, "squirrel-caging" in my head, before falling asleep again. (If I do at all.)

This is annoying. I had thought that being off work for several months would at least mean I'd be able to have a semi-normal sleep pattern, with sufficient hours, instead of the trainwreck (chunks and pieces of sleep scattered over the landscape of the day) sleep I can't seem to escape while working a graveyard-shift job.

I'm trying several things to improve my sleep. Different combos of meds, including anti-anxiety stuff to help stop the squirrel-caging, and arranging pillows to raise my upper body at an angle, instead of flat on the mattress. (This last seems to have helped.)

The sharp intense pain after surgery has mostly faded, except when the range of motion is being tested during physical therapy. Instead, deep and long-lasting aches, sometimes for hours, sometimes just in brief but intense occurences. Not necessarily around the shoulder, either; sometimes I'll get "referred pain" down my arm, or back on the shoulderblade, and once in a while I'll actually get an ache in my right arm, which is confusing.

I've been having physical therapy three times a week. This is currently passive therapy, where the therapist moves your arm around while you try and keep the arm completely limp and relaxed. Not easy to do.

Coping with day-to-day things: mixed. I'm not completely one-armed; I can use my left-hand fingers to help manipulate stuff. I just have to be careful to try and keep any hand movements from being strong enough to tighten up the shoulder muscles. Keeping the forearm snugged against my chest helps with that.

Pants: I can work the zipper up on jeans, but that waistband button? *ahem* So Ive been sticking to sweatpants and gym shorts, with elastic and/or drawstring waists.

Shirts: I mentioned in an earlier post that I picked up some snap-buttoned shirts at Good Will that can be buttoned up one-handed. What I didn't mention is that for some reason snap-buttoned shirts tend to be made from one particular style of fabric. So for the first time in my life I've been wearing plaid. PLAID! I'M WEARING PLAID! AIIIIEEEE!!! THE HORROR, THE HORROR!

Between the baggy old sweatpants, the dorkmeister plaid shirts, and the fact I've been letting my beard grow back in while off work, I've been doing a pretty good job of generating that "crazy old homeless guy" mystique that people find so fascinating and appealing.

Kitchen stuff. I can cope with a fair amount. One thing that caught me up was trying to use a can-opener; those almost all require two hands to operate. I found a OneTouch battery-powered can opener that can be used to open cans one-handed... once you've opened the battery compartment and put batteries in, a task that requires two hands.

Medication that comes in those blister packs that are so difficult to get into even two-handed? Jeezus. Prop and brace upright, then attack carefully with sharp scissors. Be prepared to curse.

So a lot of stuff I can kludge or improvise my way around, without having to ask anyone for help. That, asking for help, even when it's appropriate or necessary, is something I've always had trouble doing. So the most frustrating thing about this recovery period has been being unable to drive, and having to ask Tabbi to drive Hilde and me around. I also hadn't realized how often and casually, when out driving, I could add to or rearrange how many stops and errands I made.

I'm coping. But I'll be very glad when this is all over.

A Halloween LOL-lection

With Halloween upcoming, I thought I'd skim my LOLcat creations for appropriate entries. Feel free to re-use!

Back Home

My rotator cuff surgery went well on Wednesday, spent overnight in hospital, came home Thursday afternoon. Went to first PT session Friday; future PT will be about three times a week over the next two to three months.

Surgery site still fairly painful; trying to find the right balance between painkillers and having a semi-functional brain. Alternating Vicodan with extra-strength Tylenol about every three to four hours does a fairly good job on that.

I'll have about a two-inch scar on my shoulder when the incision is completely healed, which means I won't be able to get away with telling people about being attacked by a shark and beating the shark to death with an alligator. Damn.

Learning to cope one-handed: Some things easier than expected, some things not so easy. Some useful tips here.

Meanwhile, normal life refuses to sit back in a recliner with a bowl of chips and a big Pepsi and watch TV for the next three months. Got called last night, with the news that my mother -- who's been having her own, more serious, health problems the last few months -- took a sharp turn for the worse. Still waiting for test results to try and get a firm idea of what's going on, but it doesn't sound good, and the word "hospice" has been bandied about.