My Life in the Bush of Wombats

8:58AM - Private Lexicon, an ongoing series: Boosk

nellorat has just posted three phrases from our household idiolect ("beowulfs", "making an offering", and the immortal "thanking the pig"), which reminded me that I'd been meaning to resume posting such terms myself. And in honor of the occasion--Readercon--the obvious candidate is "boosk".

However, I see I've already posted a definition in a post outside of this series:

Years ago, Kathryn Cramer saw a yard-sale sign which proudly proclaimed the sale of "Toys--Furniture--Boosk". She decided that once "books" reach a certain critical mass, they transform into masses of "boosk".

Specifically, I would say that "books" reach the point of being "boosk" when they stop being "something you can read" and become "something you have to design your furniture scheme around". Boosk can be obstacles, boosk can be furniture, boosk can be decorations ("boosk do furnish a room!", as Athnony Pwoell declared)--but while a book contains entertainment, or information, or escape, boosk are only a burden.

7:08PM - Off to Readercon!

I know I haven't been posting much lately, so if I disappeared for a couple of extra days none would notice. Regardless, I thought I should mention that supergee and I are going to be at Readercon this weekend in Burlington, Mass. The only programming item on which I am scheduled to appear is the New York Review of Science Fiction at 20 panel Sunday morning--and I encourage everyone to attend. I expect I will be kibbitzing some from the audience in many other events. See you there, if you're there, I hope!

6:11PM - Crap: Tom Disch is dead

According to ellen_datlow and lizhand (the latter on theinferior4), Thomas M. Disch (tomsdisch) is dead by his own devising as of sometime this week. (Ellen said July 4; the Wikipedia, with no citation, says July 2.) Patrick has more, including a terrific summary of Disch's overall position in science fiction:

the concluding lines of his 1965 SF novel The Genocides, a book wedged forever up the nose of overweening skiffy can-do-ism

Disch was up the nose of science fiction his entire life.

Anyone who read Disch's LJ over the past two years could not be surprised by this. For that matter, anyone who read much of his work before that would be hard-pressed to be surprised. Which doesn't mean I'm going to miss him any less.

(Updated to add:)
Unsurprisingly, Disch's final LJ post is now turning into a wake. There has been only one stupid troll so far. There are, of course, also remembrances of him on the posts linked to above.

11:20PM - Reading old Usenet posts: Fruit and Meat

Back in 2006, I was involved in a discussion of combinations of fruit and meat, which included this exchange:

Nate Edel: Prior to reading RASSF, I had no idea that anyone ate the cranberry sauce (whether jellied or not) as a condiment on top of turkey, rather than simply as a commonly-accompanying dessert/side dish.

I responded:

Fruits and meats often go together very well.

One of minor ways I denormalize my world is to think of tomatoes as fruit and marvel at how it's completely not used as one in typical American cuisine. Hawaiian pizza (ham and pineapple) is especially exotic.

and later added:

Moshe Feder made a terrific beef with prunes and apricots the one time I had Passover at his place.

I wanted to quote this because I recently has a simply superb sandwich: a thick serving of sliced turkey breast on a dark bread, with a strong seedy mustard and very thin slices of Granny Smith apple. Lip-smacking.

6:36PM - The meaning of tragedy

The meaning of tragedy is: All is in order, all is in train.
The meaning of tragedy is: It only hurts for a little while.
The meaning of tragedy is: Change is the first law of life.

--Peter Straub, "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff" (1998)

6:33PM - Garden Path sentences

Two weeks ago, at the NYRSF weekly meeting, agrumer and bugsybanana both commented on a sentence that was hard to read correctly, the first time through:

The play is anchored in the tripartite model of being proposed in Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943).

It's hard not to read "being" as part of a single, multi-word verb ("being proposed") rather than in the correct sense, as a gerund which is the object of the preposition "of". This lead me to a discussion of "garden-path sentences", where the initial sense of a word is completely redefined by later parts of the sentence. The canonical example is "The horse raced past the barn fell", in which "raced" is first interpreted as the action of the sentence ("the horse raced past the barn") and is then redefined as part of a relative clause (the horse that was "raced past the barn" is the one that fell).

On NPR this morning [as I started writing this--June 29. I think], I heard a much better one:

North Korea has turned in to China [pause] its declaration of its nuclear weapons programs.

That is, North Korea has prepared a declaration, and turned it over to China. But before the pause, it's a completely difference sentence.

8:45AM - Just some video links, mostly teh funne

I could Del.icio.us these, but on the off-chance you all haven't seen them, I'm putting them here instead.

Politics
Unity!

John McCain Debates Himself (is there any topic on which McCain hasn't reversed himself?)

The Yes We Can video

The first response

The second response

Bravia

Balls

Play-Doh

The Joy of Living on Earth

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)

Rivka's link to the Boom-De-Yadda Awesome

Polar Bears and Dogs

And of course some more dancing

Chaiya Chaiya, with genuine subtitles

Mandatory Linkage

Are YOU Aware?

3:40PM - Sometimes someone says it so well that all you can do is echo it

" I long ago reconciled myself to never casting a vote that's not a compromise vote."

--Auguste, on Pandagon.

4:39PM - The AP: Wankers without borders

The Associated Press--the organization which exists to re-write other outlets' reporting and re-sell it without compensating them--is taking a view of the limitations of "fair use" far, far beyond anything any case law or statute will defend: that any quotation from their articles must be licensed. Patrick has a fine summary of why you should agree that this is a really bad idea.

Or, to quote another source: Bite my shiny metal ass.

Excerpt for Web Use

License parts of this article for republishing on your website or intranet. Pricing based on the number of words excerpted.

Excerpts are priced by the word.

(standard pricing)
words Fees
5-25 $ 12.50
26-50 $ 17.50
51-100 $ 25.00
101-250 $ 50.00
251 and up $ 100.00

. . .

Please honor copyright! Piracy hurts creators, devalues their works, and puts you and your employer at risk. Learn more.

12:14AM - Oddities of the human world

I discovered this particular one several years ago as part of a "Greenwich Village Scavenger's Hunt" to which I was invited by sandial. One of the goals was 18 W 11th Street, which is the site of the famous Weathermen accidental explosion in 1970. The building was rebuilt in 1978, and the facade of the new building protrudes out from the flat row of townhouses around it on either side, making it quite visible from some distance down the block; at just above ground level are two bay windows.

In the eastern window is a three-foot-tall stuffed Paddington bear; the owner change the clothes on the bear periodically to match the weather. (I guess this makes Paddington the new weatherman of W 11th.)

What made me think of this recently, I have no idea; but it occurred to me to wonder if Paddington is visible in the Google Street View image of the block. And lo,
Paddington is just barely. (Rotate once to the left to see the building.)

What a world.

12:23AM - Two thoughts on the current situation

I recently stumbled across a "I will not vote for Obama even if it means a McCain victory" post today, and have two statements from others more eloquent than anything I could say about the subject.

The first is from Lis Carey, from a 2003 Usenet post.

Politics is the art of the possible, not the art of rigid, inflexible adherence to one guiding principle to the exclusion of all other principles in complete disregard of what is actually possible.

The second is from Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who was very active in the Clinton campaign. This is my transcription of what he said on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on March 15, when the primary could still have gone either way:

A lot of people in our party are doomsday advocates, saying "This is going to kill us, we're going to be at each other's throats." I don't think so at all. I think poor Senator McCain can't get anyone to notice him for love or money, and all the focus is on our candidates. And look, we have two terrific candidates, no ifs ands or buts about it, and I think they're both capable, they're both people I think can win the fall election. I just think Hillary Clinton has the better ideas for meeting our challenges, both here in my state and in other places. . . .

I was down in Florida giving a speech to the Broward County delegates and I asked people who was for Barak Obama, and they cheered. "Who's for Hillary Clinton?", and they cheered. And I said, "Okay, I've got a message for you: one of you two groups is gonna lose. And the group that loses, I'm giving you ten days to pout, to be angry and disappointed and then you got to get over it because the stakes for this country are too high come November."

6:08PM - Random old Usenet comment

If you walk without a rhythm, you won't attract the Oompa-Loompas.

--26 Jan 2003

7:50AM - Sometimes one gets no satisfaction whatsoever from being right

I have been re-reading my Usenet posts from 1999-2003 recently (it's an odd hobby, but it brings me comfort), and I came across this from 3 November 2002:

If the administration has no idea what to do after invading Iraq, they shouldn't be invading Iraq. I believe that the administration knows exactly what to do after invading Iraq; in fact, I am sure that the administration has at least fifteen mutually incompatible plans for what to do after invading Iraq, and will proceed according to at least ten of them.

I didn't actually guess the worst--I had no idea exactly how bad the Iraq occupation would be. The best I can say is that at least my nightmare scenario has not yet come true:

It is not difficult at all to imagine a worse scenario than Saddam Hussein or his sons controlling some nuclear weapons. Here's one: The US invades Iraq, leading to a radical political whiplash throughout Western and Southern Asia, which leads to real revolutionary nutcases getting ahold of Pakistan's nuclear weapons and using them.

5:55PM - Tomorrow's Headlines--Today!

A comment at John Scalzi's Whatever:

Breaking News: Obama staffers caught using Arabic numbers in secret internal documents!

11:00PM - Quick Review: Matthew Hughes's Template

It is almost impossible to discuss Matthew Hughes's science fantasy novels of the Archonate without using the word "Vancean". So I'm not even going to try.

Vancean. Vancean! VANCEAN!

It's just such a fitting description. Like Vance, Hughes writes with a fine, clear grace, sentences that are precise and polished but smooth and natural, and studded with little gems of exotic vocabulary, as in this, the opening paragraph of Template:

The tall skinny one and the one with the shaved head kept circling to Conn Labro's right. When they came at him their attack was well coordinated, the points of their epiniards darting in at different angles, aimed at different parts of his body. Now they came again and Conn timed the double parry exactly, riposted against the skinny one so that he had to block the thrust in a way that hindered his partner's recovery.

"Epiniards"--I don't even know what they are, but I have faith the author does. It is a word evocative of both "poignard" and "épee"; I discover that "épinard" is the Romance word for spinach; I find myself wondering if some Latin taxonomist decided that spinach resembled a blade (like the gladiolus) or vice versa.

Just so you know I read past the first paragraph: Also like Vance, Hughes writes stories in a vast, technologically advanced, but vaguely archaic transplanetary human diaspora, depicted with just enough key details to make it feel convincing and not enough to make it feel preposterous. The novel is a picaresque* of Conn's exposure to other worlds and other cultures of the diaspora, discovering that the values in which he was raised are not universally held. Our hero's world is a satirical libertarian paradise, complete with literal wage slavery and public executions for cheating at cards. Over the course of his adventure, Conn learns that the financial exchange is not the sole manner of human interaction. There are fights and chases, surprises and romance, and psychotic adversaries to best.

*Not literally; our hero is no rogue, but in fact a scrupulously honest man in pursuit of someone who wishes him dead for purposes of plunder.

Template is, in brief, a delight, a fast-paced, funny, suspenseful novel full of, yes, Vancean brainkicks, carefully crafted to deliver thrills. It's a type of novel that doesn't get published much any more, and that's a bloody shame.

Full disclosure: Matt Hughes is giving away electronic copies of Template to promote its small-press publication, coming later this month. In return for the free copy, Hughes asked that the recipient mention the novel publicly--favorably not a requirement. james_nicoll organized today's mini-blogswarm of reviews, in which I'm glad to have participated. I also should mention that I have a past professional link to Hughes--I wrote the cover copy to his Tor novel, Black Brillion, which I adored. The millions of you who refrained from reading and buying that book should kick yourselves for not getting it.

10:34PM - Politics: A rhetorical reframing

I realized about a week ago that there's a pretty simple rhetorical tool that progressives, liberals, and just plain sane people can use to help assure the defeat of the lickspittles in Congress who are not Democrats or Socialists.

From now until January 20, 2009, there is no more Republican party in my language. Instead, there is "Bush's party". If I need an abbreviation, they are the BOP (Bush's Own Party).

That's all.

This idea came to me when I was listening to Harry Reid on Morning Edition, talking about the "moderate" members of the opposition party--specifically Arlen Specter, but also people like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and sometimes Chuck Hegel. What Reid said was that Specter was "always on our side, except when we need him and he votes with the Republicans." What's really going on is Specter votes with Bush, on every crucial vote. Hence, Bush's party.

There used to be honest, decent members of Lincoln's party in Washington; when there were, they deserved the name of the party he lead. But for the past fourteen years, those officials have all been high on Gingrichism and drunk with Bush. Bush couldn't have driven this country into the abyss without the gleeful, consistent, and unwavering support of his Congressional lackeys. Let them all wear his name. Maybe after a generation of self-examination, chastisement, humiliation, purges, reconsiderations, and repentance, they might again be worth of the letter R. But not now.

11:08PM - Being way behind on LJ: Sex and Summary

I'm slowly wading my way back to the present, again. Many things conspired to set me so far back--Artie's death after surgery took a lot out of me, work has again been utterly craptacular, and I lost all of this weekend just past to a double-sized NYRSF work weekend. I had a much more pleasant weekend on April 26-27, interrupted only by the misfortune of having to rush redbird to the hospital.

Anyway, one of the good things about being way way behind is that I don't feel any need to get up to my elbows in the Open Source Thing That Ate Livejournal. Almost every idea I might have contributed was already wrapped up in a superb piece on the subject, an essay by synecdochic, a writer previously unknown to me: "sex-positive". what a loaded term. (I think I found this through a link to a slightly later essay of hers, Don't Be That Guy., which was widely linked; but I found the "sex-positive" essay much more interesting.

The key sentence in "sex-positive" is a parenthetical (oh, the daring!):

(For ease of reference, let's call the two groups "sex-positive" and "getting-laid-positive".)

I might quibble with her terminology; I think "sex-positive" and "sex-for-ME-positive" gets at her point even better. But damn. that's the entire dilemma of frank sexual positivity right there. "We must all be free spirits loving like the angels . . . so make with the dry humping alreadys."

10:27PM - Worst-written headline ever?

I just spotted this in the MSNBC headlines on my LJ Portal page:

Holocaust recalled at Auschwitz

Obviously, it was defective.

6:55PM - Public Service Announcement: Eschaton has moved

I thought it was weird that my Eschaton RSS feed hadn't updated in several days. It transpires that Eschaton, the indispensable blog of political snark and random music videos, has moved from its old address to a new one: www.eschatonblog.com.

7:32AM - Health update: Acute

Last Monday morning, before work, I went to my podiatrist to get a couple of broken toenails looked at because they were interfering with my ability to sleep on my belly. (Sleeping on my belly greatly ameliorates my apnea symptoms.) This was the only progress I made on my chronic health problems last week, because I then spent the next 60 hours completely wiped out by a severe cold. From the podiatrist, I went to the office, where everyone told me I should go home, and after 45 minutes I believed them. When I got home, despite the visit from enegim and ri_whittlesey I took to my bed and slept for 20 hours. I spent most of Tuesday and a good chunk of Wednesday sick in bed as well, or sick and reading the intratubes. (I did bestir myself to drive into the City for the NYRSF weekly meeting on Wednesday. I couldn't have managed a train ride and rush-hour subway, but driving was okay.)

I was back to work on Thursday and Friday, and I had a very active weekend. I'm still somewhat coughy, but I'm feeling much better. So, back to the quest to better health. Go me.

11:23PM - Catchup: Health

I'm sick: a bad head cold with some lung involvement, which is making it nearly impossible for me to sleep.

I am borderline sleep apneaic when I'm not congested, and serious congestion pushes me into the world of No Good Sleep. I am finally going to address this, starting this week. First, I am going to return to my Ear/Nose/Throat doctor and get my deviated septum repaired, which I've been putting off for a decade. (The first time I saw him--for an ear infection--his first words to me were, "So, how badly do you snore?" Given my weight and my septum--apparently as visible across the room to a trained professional as my weight is to most people--there is no way that I wouldn't snore like an eighteen-wheeler full of chainsaws. Which I do.)

Then I'm going to a sleep clinic to determine what treatment is right for the apnea. I'd be amazed if I didn't come away with a CPAP, but who knows? Maybe the septum repair will be enough. I don't have any objection to a CPAP, so I'm not particularly concerned.

More details later when I know more. Must go to bed.

10:26PM - Catching up: Not Health Related

Work has been going moderately well. After the panic panic PANIC 30 hours I put in at the office on the weekend of March 1 and 2, work has mostly settled down to its overwhelming 11-hours-a-day-plus-commute. That, in turn, is slowly winding down and I have some hope of getting home around 7 PM most weekdays. I wouldn't bet big bags of cash on that yet, though.

I can read "my stories" (we've started calling my political blogs that) at work in slow moments, so I'm mostly caught up on that, but I am about ten days behind on LJ. I can't read LJ at work--too much of it is links to NSFW material real or imagined--so I only get to read it on weekends. This weekend was the (usually monthly) NYRSF work weekend, but because I missed last Work Weekend (see paragraph 1--it was held March 1-2, and I was otherwise engaged), I was way behind and this one ran longer than usual. (Also had to take one of the rats to the vet at noon on Satuday; and because I was very tired, I ended up taking naps both yesterday and today, something I never do.)

So, very little LJ catchup got done this weekend.

Last weekend I actually had "off" for relaxation, so here's the list of chores I did:

( This is mostly for my records, so I know how much I can get done on a weekend if I really try. )

I did do some LJ reading in among that.

The weekend before that was the tail end of the ICFA, which was, as it usually is, wonderful. It's actually kind of spooky the degree to which people there know who I am now. It was splendid, but it was a week of only minimal reading.

So, I'm ten days behind. I'm not going to skip ahead--I've caught up from further behind that this. I mention this because I'm probably going to be leaving comments on posts you've long since forgotten, because ten days in internet time is comparable to the age of the Appalachians.

Good to see you all.

Oh, and read this post by nellorat about her client and friend Sherry Britton, who died this week. I didn't know Sherry nearly as well as nellorat did, but I met her several times (during the period that she and nellorat were working together, she lived about a block from my office, so I would act as a courier), and found her utterly charming. And, of course, I got a lot of her wonderful anecdotes, both from the memoir and from gossip with n. I will miss her--the world is poorer without her.

11:23PM - Everything Else In the UNIVERSE Is Less Important than...

the fact that Fafblog is back!

"Then it's only three hundred eighty thousand miles to the moon. We can swim for it!" says Giblets. "Giblets's crater friends can smuggle us to the border from there."
"We'll haveta travel undercover if we wanna stay aheada the law," says me. "By the time we reach the checkpoint I'll be Henri DuMarche, international financier, socialite and diamond thief, an you can be NGC 5024, a mild-mannered globular cluster."
"The guards will suspect nothing!" says Giblets.

This is why the Internetz exist. That and lolcats and pictures of major political figures done up all porny and nice.

Fafblog!

1:12AM - This works frighteningly well

A found-art method for generating alternative rock album covers. (via Making Light)

Mine is behind the cut.

( That would be this cut here. )

7:39AM - E Gary Gygax: Two brief memorials

Rich Berlew, creator of the D&D-based comic strip Order of the Stick, has two great tributes, one in prose and one in comics.

Gygax was one of the most contradictory figures in the field. His personal devotion to his zany new game--his energy, his dedication, his evangelism--took D&D from a self-published fanzine-with-delusions-of-grandeur he sold from the back of his station wagon into an international phenomenon that became a touchstone of nerdiness for an entire generation. I met Gygax at my first Gencon in 1980, and he went out of his way to be kind to a fellow nerd whom he had never met, buying me breakfast for basically no reason and regaling me with tales of the early days of the game and the industry.

Contrawise, his business practices were reprehensible; the number of people he shafted on the way up is just barely justification for how badly he was shafted in return on the way down. (I have been lead to believe that later in life he and Dave Arneson were on good terms again, which amazes me in much the same way that Jack Kirby's eventual reconciliation with Stan Lee does.)

Mainly, though: How many people get to create an entire art-form? Gygax did, for better and worse, and today he's gone and the world is poorer for that.

updated to add: The two best one-off comments I've seen so far are "The memorial service will be held in 1d4+2 days" and "So, did his doctors rifle through his pockets to find gems and magic items?". The memorial suggest in the link given by lavendertook in the comments is brill, too.

11:12PM - Happy Birthday, Tim Powers!

I don't normally send out birthday greetings, especially not to people who aren't even on LJ, but he's the only person I know with a Leap Day birthday and I figured he has to jam as many best wishes into the day as he possibly can.

Here's to at least 14 more!

12:16AM - I'm probably the ten millionth person on your flist to post this

But if I'm not, go, watch, even if you normally don't "go, watch".

Sarah Silverman's romantic message to Jimmy Kimmel:
( Sweet love )
and his loving response (broadcast immediately following the Oscars):
( Sweeter, sweeter, lover )
Probably not work safe. But you could have guessed that from the words "Kimmel" and "Silverman".

10:42PM - Steve Gerber, 1947-2008

Before I even understood the idea that comic books were created by individuals, I had a favorite comics writer.

He died on Sunday.

Mark Evanier, who was a good friend to Steve, has been overseeing the online tributes at Gerber's blog. If Steve made a difference in your life--and if you've read comics in the last thirty-five years, he probably did--you might want to stop by and tell the world. I can attest from my own experiences, these acts of kindness and memory mean a lot to those who remain to go on.

Heidi MacDonald--one of my favorite writers about comics--has her remembrance here which does a great job of explaining how Gerber's biggest works hit us at the time. Tom Spurgeon, the best reporter in the field and a fine writer on his own, has a more traditional, and comprehensive, obituary.

I also think that no mention of Gerber's death should go without a link to The Hero Initiative, a charitable organization devoted to helping comics creators in severe need. Gerber was famously mistreated by the American comics industry, and his last years would have been much worse without the Heroes.

10:39PM - No dog in this fight

I am not a Facebook user; I am not a player of Scrabble or Scrabulous; and generally I'm not very excitable about trademark violations.

However, I have to point to this this comment from the BBC's article on the Scrabulous affair. (Background: Hasbro and Mattel, who split the worldwide ownership of Scrabble between them, are requesting that Facebook take down Scrabulous, which is a precise clone of the board game and physically resembles it to a degree that it's a clear trademark violation. There's a good screenshot of Scrabulous in this ABC article. Games--the rules of games--aren't covered by copyright, but their components can be, and they certainly can be protected by trademark. On the face of it, Hasbro and Mattel--which can agree on nothing else--are almost certainly well within their rights to do this.)

The comment was this:

Interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live Karl Savage, a member of the Save Scrabulous group, said: "A lot of people are saying shame on Hasbro, shame on Mattel, if you wouldn't be so short-sighted about this then you have an opportunity to actually make some money from this rather than alienate your existing customers. . . ."

Well, yes, except for the fact that neither Hasbro nor Mattel controls the online rights to Scrabble. The world's largest computer game manufacturer, Electronic Arts, does, at least for the next few years--they apparently picked them up from Infogrames/Atari after Hasbro renegotiated the sale of Hasbro Interactive to Infogrames in 2001.

Yes, this is a tangled thicket of rights and reassignments. But you'd think that a) someone who is deeply interested in the online version of Scrabble might want to do a smidgen of research before telling reasonably successful multinational corporations how to run their businesses, and b) that the BBC reporter covering the matter might take the time to find out if the person interviewed has even the slightest sense of what he's talking about before quoting him.

11:34AM - John Edwards Loves You And He Wants All Your Money, with Footnote about Larry Niven

The Kossac known only as KingOneEye is organizing a get-out-the-money blog swarm* on behalf of Edwards. It is scheduled for this Friday, January 18. As he says,

$7 million dollars is a lot of money to raise online, and 5 days is not a lot of time to organize. But if Ron Paul can do it, fer gawds sake, we ought to be able to.

*One of the few truly prophetic works of science fiction was Larry Niven's set of "teleportation" short stories from the late 1960s--"The Alibi Machine", "All the Bridges Rusting", "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club", and especially "Flash Crowd". Although they are ostensibly about teleportation--a technology I consider basically impossible as described--they managed to predict many of the dynamics of life in the wired world, where distance and location are, in many ways, less important than affinity groups, notoriety, and the flow of information.

In the early, most popular years of Slashdot, it was a common occurrence for a site to get mentioned on Slashdot and then crash under the weight of all the people linking through. Although usually known as "the Slashdot effect", I've always called these events "Slash crowds." I supposed that these blogosphere-wide fundraising drives could, in turn, be called "cash crowds".