The Political Desk - US Rep. 9th District

The biggest prize on my ballot is the US Representative, 9th District. The 9th runs from Bellevue and Mercer Island down to Federal Way and Auburn and has an incredibly diverse population, strong ties to Boeing, and includes SeaTac airport.

The incumbent is Adam Smith. Nope, not the 18th Century economic philosopher, but the 30-year Democratic incumbent. He's usually challenged from the right, but most recently from the left. He is currently the head of the House Armed Services committee. He's of the Centrist Moderate breed, but has been against a swollen military budget, against the war/conflict/whatever with Iran, and has most recently come out in favor of impeaching the President. By the same token, he's partially responsible for Trump retaking the White House in 2024 by being a leading voice in advising President Biden not to run for re-election. So now we have a guy in charge who is in even worse physical and mental condition (while Biden, when he pops up in public view, is looking pretty spry for a dude fighting cancer).

His big opponent is Kshama Sawant, socialist and former member of the Seattle City Council. As a member of council, she led the charge for raising the minimum wage in Seattle. She's also a passionate firebrand who has been disciplined and arrested on occasion for public protests. The Stranger likes her because she does not play well with others and throws elbows. 

Also to the left of Mr. Smith is Melissa Chaudhry, who ran against Smith the last time and is running a grassroots campaign. She's anti-ICE (for good reason - her husband was picked up in the sweeps - she fought against them in court and won). She's also admitted that she's running as a Democrat for the primaries, and should she win, she'll switch over to the Green Party. She's an excellent candidate, but that gives me a little pause.

We also has a Socialist Workers Party candidate Jacob Perasso, who supports, well, worker's rights, and his other position (opposing the whatever in Iran. infrastructure, Ukraine) all comes from that basis. There hasn't been a lot of noise about his campaign.

Finally, we're looking at the lone Republican, Doug Basler, who pushes the idea of "common sense, moderation, and "practical solutions in a highly charged political environment" in his voter's write-up, without mentioning that his previous election-denying conspiracies as conservative talk-show host, he contributed to that high charging. 

As a gamer, I'm looking at Mr. Smith, holding the most moderate position, carrying through the general, and since we have three candidates to the left, and one candidate to the right, it is likely the more progressive votes will splinter and it will be Smith vs Basler, where the republican candate gets about a third of the total votes. 

As a voter? A lot of pundits are going for "No choice" so far here, but I'm going to put my counter on Adam Smith. Not because I agree with him on everything, or forgive him for past mistakes, but because he actually sounds like he's listening to his constituents and representing them accordingly. 

More later, 

The Political Desk: The Primary Madness Begins

 All right, he says, rolling up his sleeves. Let's do this.

This time of year, I descend into madness and talk about upcoming elections, chasing off those readers who are expecting theatre reviews, book reviews, and the occasional cavalcade of new game releases. I've been doing it for twenty-five years now, so why stop now?

And, for people who have just stumbled onto this site, I have rules, because what are we as a civilization if we don't have rules?

• I comment on races that are on my personal ballot. And those are for the northern portion of Kent, Washington, that includes Panther Lake, on the East Hill. And I like it that way. I mean, who am I to tell you what to do with your vote if I don't have skin in the game? And while I will on occasion dabble in elections beyond my normal ken, I try to keep it to a minimum. 
• For the primaries, I ignore races which have only two candidates, usually. Washington State is a top two primary state, which means that top two vote-getters go ahead to the general election. That has a tendency to reduce (but not eliminate) the power of traditional political parties. Now, they have money and the ability to get their message out, but that's not always the case. Further, because it is top-two, we often see two Democrats (and rarely two Republicans, but it happens) vying for a position.
• I really want to put good people in office. You know, folks who will do the job, even if they don't agree with me on every point. I further like people who are willing to listen to opposing viewpoints, and maybe, maybe see their own viewpoints altered as a result. And for a bunch of offices, we don't even list who is the official Dem/GOP candidate, so you have to do your own digging and see who is endorsing who.
• I don't post these on Facebook, Bluesky, or the other socials, because these are frankly my opinions and I don't feel like splattering them over the joint (there are enough people already doing that sort of this - go have at!). So if you want the very-local political dirt, you have to tune in here to this station. 
• I give other references, though that number has subsided in recent years, much to my frustration (I really miss the Municipal League). The Seattle Times tends to lean towards pro-business, centrist views, though they have a new publisher, who is son of the old publisher. The Stranger also has a new publisher (and is looking for a new editor-in-chief), and usually swings to the left, though this year they don't like much of anyone because even the progressives don't tick all their boxes. There are a few others out there, like the The Urbanist, which endorses on a wide swath of offices and for the serious lefties among you, the Lefty Cheat Sheet compiles all the various endorsements (unions, blogs, newspapers) in one place. We also get a voter's guide, which should help as well, since all the entries are penned by the candidate, or at least by candidate's people, and while there is a high percentage of "I'm honored to serve you" type of statements, there are often red flags and windows into dark souls in that mess.

Now, Washington is mail-voter state, which means you get a ballot, you fill it out, and you mail it back (or drop it off in one of a number of drop-boxes).  I think that works. When I first moved here, we had more traditional voting, where you had to take time off whatever you were doing that day and get to a polling location. We were in Rush precinct, and the polling location was at the bottom of the hill at Meeker School. I would pop in before I went to work and would be voter #3. The Lovely Bride would show up in early afternoon and be voter #16. So, yeah, I like getting more people voting, even if they don't vote the way I want them to.

Now, some of our conservative brethren are not wild about this state of affairs. They love elections, mind you, but of the authoritarian breed, where there is one official candidate, selected for you in advance, and only certain people are permitted to vote. And opposition candidates tend to get arrested, exiled, or fall out of dangerously unsafe windows. They've already tried to get an initiative this year where they can go through the voting roles and get rid of folk they don't like (which failed to get enough signatures to get on the ballot this fall, so I'd say it wasn't popular). On the National Level they've been trying to convince people that Trump won in 2020 (they've lost 60 court cases so far trying to prove that) and want the Post Office to stop delivering ballots to your home, and to stop counting those ballots if the Post Office doesn't postmark them in time. So vote early folks, while you still have the chance.

And that's about it. We are on a fairly tight schedule here  - the due date is 4 August, which is right around the corner. So let's blow through the ones on my ballot and I can get back to talking about collectable quarters.

More later, 

Book: The Old New Weird

 Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville, Del Rey Books, an imprint of Random House, 2016

Provenance: I picked this up at the Page Turner in downtown Kent, when I was looking for a completely different book. And that's the nature of the Page Turner in that sort of thing happens quite often.

Review: OK, I'm a fan of China Miéville, but I haven't read everything that he's written. I started early with Perdido Street Station (published in 2000), and the two other books set in the same world, The Scar and The Iron Council. I enjoyed The City and City and Kraken (which I did not review - I don't review everything here), and really liked (and reviewed) October, a non-fiction book about the Russian Revolution. So I picked up this collection of his short fiction, adding it to the To Be Read pile, and finally getting into it in the past month or so. 

And, to my lack of surprise, I enjoyed it tremendously. There are a LOT of stories here, ranging from widely-published works to stuff that was used as handouts at a exhibition in Liverpool. As a result, though you get a good feeling for how and what Miéville writes over a number of different stories. 

When Miéville first showed up with Perdido Street Station, he quickly got folded into his own subgenre- the New Weird. This was over 25 years ago, so the patina of "new" may have gotten a bit threadbare since then, but there are not a lot of other books that fit neatly into that category. Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer gets mentioned a bunch as a sister volume, and I could put The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin in that general category. Piranesi could elbow its way in as well with a good argument or two.

But genre is a slippery marketing term - it effectively says: If you liked THAT, you'll like THIS. But it also sets up it own set of walls - This is NOT magical realism. This is NOT urban fantasy. This is not old school or cozy or like a lot of other things you've seen. It is akin to all of that, but it is a thing of its own right. The Old Weird belongs to Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft, and it has a good linkage with that as well, but this is a different animal.

So what is Miéville's encampment of the New Weird? Well, it has strange doings - icebergs calving above the skies of London, animated oil rigs. card decks with suits that only appear once in a lifetime, or etchings on bones newly-pulled from cadavers. It has body horror, in addictive parasites to people who put on dead animal heads or medical actors who suddenly present with symptoms for future diseases.  Miévilles brand of the New Weird is very urban (usually) and Londonian (keep your wiki link open for when you hit something idiosyncratic).

Most of all (and I think this applies to the New Weird in general) - it is unexplained. No one steps forward in the story with a reason why animated oil rigs are blundering ashore like kaiju.  Even those seeking the truth discover nothing but dead ends and unsure resolutions. Miéville in his short fiction keeps his focus tight on his protagonists (who are also usually his victims), and they are awash in this unsurity as well. This may be a hallmark of the NW, or at least Miévilles patch of earth within it.

It is interesting and puzzling and amazing and horrible and wonderful. It's worth hunting down and reading.

More later, 

Book and a Movie: Kick in the Pance

 The Benson Murder Case by S.S. Van Dyne, Charles Scribener's Sons, 1926

The Benson Murder Case, Directed by Frank Tuttle, Paramount Pictures, 1930

Provenance: Picked this up at the Page Turner, Kent's expansive used and new bookstore. It particular book also happened to be of the collection of Sacnoth, who had been cleaning out his shelves over time. He in turn had purchased the book in 1996 in Madison, Wisconsin (he tends to annotate all his books). This book was one of my "waiting books" - read when I'm waiting for an appointment, or for friends to show up at a restaurant. As a result, I may get two or five pages in before I have to put it aside. So the "waiting books" will be carried around for a while in a deep-pocketed jacket before finally getting finished.

As for the movie version, Sacnoth and friends watch old movies on Saturdays when we are not playing Call of Cthulhu, and have gone through all four of the William Powell Vance movies. While the book is the first of the Vance Vance novels, the movie version was the third starring William Powell. 

Reviews: As the first Philo Vance novel, and it is interesting in what it shows and what drops away later in the series, as well as changes made for the movies. Philo Vance is one of the elite dilettante school of detectives (Lord Peter Wimsey beats him out, since he first showed up in 1923 and who, like Vance, has a friend in law enforcement that allows him access to ongoing cases. 

In the case of the book, Vance's bud, District Attorney Markham is approached by an old and respected friend to investigate the death of his brother, who was his partner in a stock firm. The brother was found seated in his chair in his living room, dressed in his smoking jacket, shoeless and without his toupee, shot through the head. There was a large amount of evidence cast about, and the DA and police go through several suspects, all of which get proven innocent in turn by Vance.

Vance rejects such trivialities as facts and evidence and concentrates on the psychological nature of the killer - what sort of person would kill Benson in this matter? He claims to know the murderer from the get-go, but dances about, demonstrating to the DA that the latest prime suspect fails the test for some reason or another. In fact, he seems to delight in proving the agents of law enforcement wrong, all the while concern trolling their predicament. He's a bit arrogant about the whole thing.

The Van Dyne who is the narrator claims that position as being Vance's lawyer, and is only telling the tale now because Vance has retired to Europe. In the book, he serves no purpose as a character but to declare Vance as being brilliant and noting the growing frustration of the DA as Vance shows off one blind alley after another. Vance in this initial book comes off as insufferable, such that the DA (and the reader) just wants to shout "give us the answer, already". He actually becomes more likeable in later novels, but still absolutely sure of himself.

The movie, on the other hand, junks about everything except the title, Vance, and some of the supporting cast. Our invisible narrator did not make the transfer. In addition, the movie version riffs off the recent stock market crash. Benson is confronted with a bunch of clients who have lost money and are fed up with his shenanigans. Benson then retires to his country house and is shot. And it turns out Benson lives right next door to his good friend DA Markham, who brings along Vance to investigate. And one of the suspects says that Vance just got lucky in a previous case and challenges him to find the real culprit.

Which of course, he does. But he does it with a bit more grace than his novel incarnation, and more attention to the little facts and clues. He uses less psychobabble in his  explanations (I swear, the last chapter of the book is filled with his explanation of why the killer HAD to be a certain suspect, in part because women are not cool-headed enough to shoot a man accurately in the head). The movie version really hinges of William Powell's performance, who makes Vance actually likable. You can see the bits and bemused  mannerisms that he will bring to the Thin Man movies (and yeah, he's more likeable there than in the original book version as well).

So yeah, the novel is a time capsule - Vance was incredibly popular in his time, and the line "Philo Vance needs a kick in the pance" from Ogden Nash (of limerick fame) in 1931 just underscores the both the character's popularity and division he presented to readers. The movie version is traditional for its era as well, but a lot easier to swallow and worth hunting down if you're a fan of old pre-code Hollywood.

So yeah, check out the movie if you have a spare afternoon. The book? Only if you have a deep interest.

More later,

Faceplant

You know, I don't talk a lot about my personal life around here, but this one was an adventure, so I'll share.

Last Saturday, the Lovely Bride and I went to Bainbridge Island, which is across the Sound from Seattle. We were invited to a friend's housewarming party and decided to make a day of it. So after our Saturday morning Tai Chi class we changed out of our uniforms and headed into downtown Seattle to catch the ferry. There was no FIFA soccer game that day, and the Pride parade was going to be Sunday, so it was a pretty straight shot, and after about an hour's wait on the Seattle side, we drove onto the Wenatchee ferry and headed to Bainbridge.

And Bainbridge was pretty classy, though we only saw a small fraction of it this time. We had lunch at poke place in a converted gas station not too far from the ferry docks, and took in the Bainbridge Island Art Museum, a small museum with very nice paper and fabric art.

And then ...

I missed stepping up onto a curb while crossing back to the parked car. I pitched forward, and had my hand in my pocket, fishing out the car keys so I could not catch myself. I went down like a sack of wet cement at the side of the road, my head bouncing off the asphalt and driving the frame of my now-broken glasses into my eyebrow. 

There was blood. A lot of blood. And a lot of concerned, helpful passers-by who helped me to my feet and suggested calling an ambulance. The LB and I got back to the car, and I ruined one of her handkerchiefs mopping up blood while she found the nearest urgent care on her phone. We went there, expecting to get cleaned up and maybe a few stitches for the eyebrow.

Instead ...

Due to my age and the fact that I had a bit of resistance turning my head to the right, they put me into an immobilizing collar and popped me into an ambulance bound for Silverdale, which was the closest ER. That took about twenty minutes, and was the first time I was conscious in an ambulance. Not bad. At the ER, they did a battery of tests on me - an MRI which showed I had no concussion, an x-ray that said I had extreme arthritis in my right hand, and an ultrasound that determined I had no blood clots in my right leg (though I still have a pain in the front quad muscle there, but I had that before I stage-dived on the road). And then they cleared the asphalt fragments out of my wounds, closed the eyebrow gash with some glue, bandaged me up and sent me on my way.

At this point, the shortest route home was south through Tacoma, so we stopped at the Lobster Shop for a pleasant meal (The LB had refitted my glasses together enough that I was presentable, though of course she was driving by that point). And since then, I've been at home, self-medicating on Tylenol and rum & colas and taking my meetings in on slack and zoom.

And that's about it. The only interesting note was that the Lovely B was really impressed with Bainbridge, and liked the idea of "island life", right up to the point that she found out the nearest hospital was a half-hour drive away. That cooled her ardor a bit.  But in the mean time, I'm still working from home and concentrating on healing up.

And that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. 

More later, 

Book: Women in Their 20s

 Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade, Harcourt Books, 2004

Provenance: Unsure, but from the pencil marking on the inside cover, I'd guess Half-Price Books. It looked like an overstock as opposed to a truly used book. 

Review: First off, bad title. The hair style of the title make is only glancingly noted, and references to bootleggers and speakeasies are mostly incidental. It doesn't exactly scream 1920s, but maybe. The secondary title is kinda incomplete as well, since we're going to be talking about four women who write as opposed to everyone else in the field. Only when we get to the third sub-title down do we address who we are talking about - Edna St. Vincent Milay, Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Important female writers of the era.

OK, quick summary for those under 100 years old: Edna Ferber was a popular and award-winning novelist who is best remembered for her Broadway adaptations (like Showboat, which you may have seen in high school productions). The other Edna - St. Vincent Milay, known here as Vincent, was a popular poetess. Dorothy Parker made her way on essays, short stories and sniping reviews in the nascent New Yorker. And Zelda labored in the shadow of her husband F. Scott, who wanted to be more successful than he was. 

They were not a group. They were not a movement. They worked in different spheres. They attended some of the same parties, but direct encounters between them were few and unmemorable. They all worked in the hothouse environment of New York City literati in the 20s, a neatly-compacted decade that ran from the creation of Prohibition to the Crash. 

And we have a lot of information about these writers because they were wrote everything down - diaries, notes, letters, and stories on things based on their lives. Moreso, since they ran about with a bunch of other writers, we have all of their notes, diaries, letters, and stories as well. The end result here is a chatty, gossipy, personal, and in places honestly bitchy presentation of the 20s in New York City. And Europe. Because post-war France was a great, cheap place to escape to if you were a member of the Lost Generation and had the petty cash. 

The book itself travels through the decade year by year, and concentrates on the lives and adventures of its subjects. Alcohol and abortions. Insights and illnesses. Trysts and travails. It gives a good scan of their growth and success as writers, but also the pitfalls of their craft - writer's block and problematic relationships and too many house parties and summer homes. 

All of the writers have their own arc and some sense of resolution. Ferber got a Pulitzer and showed you could succeed both commercially and literarily and ended the decade hosting small parties at her penthouse. Milay ascended into poetic godhood, retreated to the country, and pursued a young muse with her husband's permission. Zelda suffered under F. Scott (who comes off as complete asshole here), who only started to support her when she went into physical and mental decline. And Dorothy kept plugging along through boom and bust times, just writing. Of the group she's probably the best-remembered, owing the wit and meme-worthiness of here poems and short works.

The past is a foreign country - they do things differently there. I'm a fan of the 20s, which dovetails neatly with my interest in the Call of Cthulhu RPG. From this volume I've picked up that a trans-Atlantic cruise was not THAT big a thing if you had the money, and at the time, writers were actually being paid more (An easy conversion was to multiply any figures within by ten). There are a lot of bits and bobs here that I may find use for elsewhere, and you might as well. 

In the meantime, I've excavated a collection of Dorothy Parker's short stories from the basement library, and intend to curl up with that. 

More later,

Book: Timestop

 The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, Avid Reader Press (Simon & Schuster), 2024

Provenance: World Con was in Seattle last year, and though I did not attend, I resolved to read the Hugo novel nominees for that year. And I failed, bailing out halfway through one of the Adrian Tchaikovsky novels. But I did get a copy of The Ministry of Time front the local Barnes & Noble, which has, it should be noted, very much improved over the past couple years.

Review: This book was well-lauded before I even reached it. It is a New York Times bestseller, a pick for the Good Morning America Book Club, a monthly pick for Barnes & Noble, a Best Book of the Year for NPR, Vanity Fair, Good Housekeeping, and some 25 more outlets. Oh, and Obama liked it as well.

I liked it. It didn't win a Hugo. And yeah, I think I understand why.

So here's the skinny. Our unnamed narrator/protagonist works for government ministry in London, and discovers, after she has been hired, that it has a time machine. Sort of. They have access to a "time door" that they can open into other eras. And not to mess up the timeline, they are taking/kidnapping people from the past near the end of their lives in situations where they would not be missed. One of these is Graham Gore, one of the crewmen on the Franklin Expedition. 

Now, the Franklin Expedition rates up there with Nikola Tesla in the things-nerds-care-about-department. The Franklin Expedition consisted of the ships Terror and Erebus, which were dispatched with two years of supplies to find the Northwest Passage. They didn't find one, but instead got trapped in the ice for a couple years, and its people (including Gore) died either on the ice or trying to escape it. Including Gore. Except Gore got kidnapped and was brought to this near future London where the effects of climate change is already starting to flood the city. 

Our unnamed narrator serves as a "bridge" for Gore, along with some fellow workers for other expats from the past. And "bridge" is a good title for combination minder/agent/guide to the modern world. She and Gore fall in love, discover a conspiracy from their future that intends to capture or destroy the time door, and their allies start dropping like flies. 

So the novel veers from dark workplace comedy into rom-com, then slingshots into a thriller, and finally sticks the landing in a science fictional space. Our narrator is relating what she knows of the story, which is more about the effects of time travel on a relatively small group of people - the bridges, the ex-pats, the management, and the assassins from the future.  Early on, she lays down the absurdity of the situation.

"How does it work? How can it work? I exist at the beginning and the end of this account, which is a kind of time travel, and I'm here to tell you: don't worry about it. All you need to know is that in the very near future, the British Government developed a means of time travel but had not experimented with it."

That's a pretty piece of writing, with tenses spilling all over the place. But what its talking about, the nature of the document you're reading does get explained, and it makes sense by the end. At the time, I thought it was going to be a denial of the SF tropes we all know - paradoxes, grandfather clauses, alternate futures. But you're going to run into them, but from the ground-level view. So we embrace the tropes, but not the way you might think.

The book is really good, and deserves to be a Hugo nominee, but I can see how it didn't make the final cut, and much of that is because of the nature of genre. As noted above, the book refuses to "stay in its lane", and while I like that, I understand that it might not resonate elsewhere. But also its part of its own provenance, and how it entered the market. Ministry of Time first showed up in the new fiction release as opposed to the SF areas of bookstores. Most of its high praise comes from traditional/mainstream sources. It was therefore "not of the body" of SF-Dom. Genre can be both a leg up (a "guaranteed" customer base) and a limitation (reaching out beyond that "guaranteed" base). 

Still, Ministry of Time is worth considering on the quality of its writing, and I recommend you check it out. 

More later,