Boots on the Ground

With my recent absences, I hope you've been taking advantage of cruising the linkage on the right-hand side of the site. They're friends, whose entries vary from regular updates to lunar rotations, and whose contents vary from detailed and accessible to explicable only to close friends and relations. However, two of them in the past day have touched on the Real War and deserve promotion here.

Mystical Forest has a friend who is part of a sniper team in Mosul, and checks in regularly, reporting on the good stuff (our guys grok the whole "hearts and minds" thing) and the bad stuff (the rear echelon doesn't). Go read it.

Nikchik, on the other hand, covers the commute from the home front. Go read this as well.

In other news, our Commander-in-Chief has started a five-week vacation. I can think of a few others who could use the break.

More later (And I mean it. Really),

But in the Munich Circus, I was known as . . .

Still busy, but have one of those "What X-Person are you?" quizzes, gakked from Lady Gumdrop.

You scored as Nightcrawler. Nightcrawler is a very symbolic X-Man. He is persecuted by society because of his devilish looks, but it is his faith in God that gives him strength. He is a very gentle x-man but he does know how to fight and he enjoys fencing. Powers: Teleportation Nightcrawler 80% Jean Grey 75% Beast 75% Storm 65% Cyclops 60% Wolverine 55% Colossus 55% Rogue 55% Iceman 50% Gambit 45% Emma Frost 45% Most Comprehensive X-Men Personality Quiz 2.0 created with QuizFarm.com

Odd, I usually end up with The Beast in these.

Exhaustion

This is probably the longest time so far without any posting with me still being in town. Quite simply, my schedule has been knocked askew by the new gig, plus getting all the old gigs out of the way at the same time. I tend to rise at 6, get to work by 7, leave 4ish, home by 5 or 6. devote a few hours to writing and dinner, then crash early to repeat the process. This has resulted in me catching up on my sleep on Saturday morning, and with less-then-productive weekends.

There have been casualties. I already bailed out of some large projects that were in the offing (wisely, as it turned out - I can barely get my small stuff in line). My World of Warcraft characters languish as my friends' second collection of characters are catching up and passing me. An industry mailing list I'm on has changed formats and I never bothered to follow it. My regular mail is piling up, unanswered. I generally have managed to keep something a social life (Tai Chi on Wednesday, D&D group on Thursday), but missed the most recent poker game from sheer exhaustion.

And there's stuff to talk about. They found a tenth planet (which, if I seem to remember, we've found two or three times in the last decade alone). They tested a sasquatch hide and found it to be a bison. Not content just to get its primary back, the state GOP declared you could only be in their primary if you got a certain percentage of the vote in its conventions (this was overturned, but still that is pretty durned insecure). And there is a kerfuffle about an extremely violent video game that got kicked up a notch when it was "discovered" you could unlock some lame, demeaning sex to go with the lame, demeaning violence. One take on the matter is here, while a counterpoint is here.

Oh, and the GWOT (Global War on Terror) is over, replaced in official parlance with GSAVE, which is the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. Just in case you think people have been sitting on their hands about this. Now, Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism is both more acurate than the old term as well as more flexible (it doesn't require we use the military every bloody time). But as an acronym, it's up there with Carter' energy program, the Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW).

In the mean time, I've got a lot going on, and am in the weeds until I get a few of the freelance projects out of my life.

More later, probably.

Friendly Neighborhood Spiedie-Man

So the weekend was tough. In part because I've been working on a lot of freelance that I agreed to before taking the contract job. But also because I spent a good chunk of Saturday playing World of Warcraft with friends (that would be real-life friends who I am meeting online to play - its sort of like my Thursday Night group without having to leave the house). All our characters are in late level 20s, early level 30s, and getting the crud kicked out us by Elites five levels lower than we are. Sigh.

But the cool thing was Sunday afternoon, where we gathered at T'ed and Jill's place for his Spiediefest. A spiedie (pronounced SPEE-dee) is marinated meat (we used chicken and pork) served on a hoagie roll, and is the pride and joy of Binghamton, NY, where T'Ed once lived. There are a wide variety of marinades, but T'ed swears by Lupos, and have to admit they were pretty durn good. The company was excellent - mostly WotC and former WotC, with only a few of them engaging in the weirdness of web sites. Families, discussions of movies and books, and lots of spiedies. Very pleasant.

But now, back to the fray. More later,

Nonfiction: Poker Night

Dealer’s Choice: The Complete Handbook of Saturday Night Poker, by Janes Ernest, Phil Foglio, and Mike Selinker, Overlook Duckworth, 2005

Pay attention, because this review will tell you how to make money at poker.

I’m part of a pretty eclectic and erratic poker group that meets about once a month or so at “Castle Pikachu”, a painted lady up in the Greenwood area north of the city. The hosts are noted cartoonists Phil and Kaja Foglio, who are the creators of the Girl Genius comic (which is now On-Line – go check it out). The number and identities of the players change over time, but consists of other cartoonists, writers, game designers, programmers, air force veterans, a professional magician, mini-robot builders, and other bloggers (who range from small personal journals to regulars on the Daily Kos). There are usually four or so hubs to this Friday party, one upstairs with the kids, one down in the living room, one in the kitchen, and, of course, one at the poker table.

This is nickel-dime-quarter poker, easy for those short of money or limited of attention span, and enlivened by all manner of poker variants(“the game is Hamlet – Kings are dead, Queens are wild, and Jacks are low”). Now you’re sitting around with game designers, so some of the variants turn very variant indeed.

So it was only a matter of time before all this turned into a book. Phil (who does wonderful cartoons), Mike Selinker (former WotC guru and puzzle-maker for Games Magazine) and James Ernest (owner/designer/sage of Cheap Ass Games, makers of Kill Dr, Lucky and the now-renamed Before I Kill you, Mr Bond) have conspired to put together to put together a great big book of poker variants.

Let me get this out of the way first – this book has the worst cover in Christendom. You have an award-winning cartoonist among your writers with a distinctive style (who does great cartoons all the way through the book) and you choose as your cover the typical lame poker-book cover – Green felt background, chips, and cards. And they probably wonder why this book is doing just OK on Amazon, and much better in the brick-and-mortar stores (where people can, you know, actually LOOK at it).

The contents, however, are delightful. They go through the basics of setting up a Friday night (well, they call it Saturday night, another marketing weirdness) poker game, the basics, and delve into a huge number of variants, ranging from the mildly amusing (Seven Nice Cards, Jane Austen, Call the King), to the positively deadly (Heinz 57, Diablo). Some of my favorites are in here, along with a couple that will drive me from the table.

And, James, Phil, and Mike also write it all in a very accessible, readable, fashion, like someone at one of these poker games talking about the game. Their stories get into all the details that they know, relating both facts and folklore, and they tend to mock themselves, their fellow cardplayers, and anything else they find within range. It has a great voice, and that voice is a frankenstien of James, Phil, and Mike (Frankenstein, of course, is another game entirely).

I have to note that book mocks in particular “Jeff the Math Genius”. I must confess that I am not Jeff the Math Genius, but rather another Jeff entirely. I call Jeff the Math Genius by the name “Jeff Prime”, since he has been playing longer than I have. Sorry about that. I’m not the Jeff you’re looking for.

Oh yeah, the money-making thing. Last time I was playing poker, I said to Phil “I’m going to have to get a copy of that book.”

Phil says, “I have extras. I’ll sell you one.”

And that, folks, is how to make money at poker.

More later,

Made A Wrong Turn At Latveria

So while bouncing around the net, I found this cute little puzzle where you have to pin the nations on the map of Europe. Oddly enough, long-time experience playing WWII wargames is little help in the face of 60 years of additional European history.

More later,

Two Bits

So today in change I got a couple Oregon quarters. which rate up there with the Connecticut quarters as a favorite design. While a lot of states have gone for a hodgepodge of symbols and icons, both states have chosen single, solid elements that embody their states and give their coins a distinctive appearance and a unified feel.

And speaking of unified, the Seattle Times led section B with an article reporting that the Washington State Representitives, Democrat and Republican, are standing united against Enron. The bankrupt and corrupt energy corporation, after gouging western states during a manufactured energy crunch, is now seeking damages against the states that terminated their agreements after they realized they were being had. Opposing the corporation's additional gouging (of some $125 million in Snohomish County alone), the entire Washington State Delegation are supporting an amendment to an energy bill to keep Enron from pursuing those funds. What makes this doubly impressive is that not only that GOP members are supporting the amendment, but that their numbers include Doc Hastings of Pasco, who is in charge of investigating his own party superior, Tom Delay (who, in turn, would rather Enron get another break). And though he's not mentioned in the article - "unanimous support" means that our local rep, Dave Reichert, is on board as well. This is a case of the state pulling together, and I think its a wonderful thing.

Oh, and the person sponsoring the amendment? Senator Maria Cantwell. So it looks like she has no trouble working across party lines on some things. And, to their credit, neither do some of the other representitives of our state.

Now if we can only get a quarter as cool as Oregon's.

More later,

Blogrolling

One of the strengths of this journal is also one of its weaknesses - its diversity. Quite simply, I talk about a lot of things. This is good for variety, but bad for staying "on message" and delivering a regular installment of whatever-it-is-people-tune-in-here-for.

I do politics, but I wouldn't call this a polical blog. I do reviews but it isn't really a review blog. I am a game designer and an author but wouldn't call this a gamer's blog or a writer's blog. And it deals with personal stuff, but doesn't concentrate too much on the boring details of daily life (though I should note that the Lovely Bride entered into battle yesterday with a nest of paper wasps. The wasps won, but the LB suffered only a handful of stings and is currently planning revenge). I go off on loops on comics and would-be states of the union (I still want to do a bit on the state of Sequoia), but usually that comes to an end eventually. And I talk about the media, but this is hardly a media blog.

Part of this is my low attention span, but part of it is because other people do political blogs and review blogs and media blogs better than I. In particular, Blatherwatch does a pretty nifty job on reporting on the media scene in Seattle. In particular they cover local daytime radio and the deep ties it has with its corporate masters and conservative audience. I enjoy this site on an almost-daily basis, and recently sent them a letter to correct a mistake.

A couple of days ago they were dealing with Harry Potter (like, it seems, everyone else on the planet, including the Lovely Bride (when she wasn't fighting paper wasps)), and their spin was about the more-religious conservatives getting their shorts in a knot about the book and in particular it sorcerous subject matter. The Blatherfolk acquitted themselves pretty well, but noted that "Witches aren't even in the bible." Coming from one of those Protestant splinters that believes in a) bible-readings, and b) bringing a covered dish to pass, I thought this was off-base. Pulling a few of my bibles from the shelves (yes, I keep different editions), I did the research and called them on it. And they fessed up with good graces. Which I thought was pretty nice. Just go read the letter. And they linked back here, so I thought it only fair to return the favor.

And for me, I discovered that while I would generally rather be Left than Right, there are times that I'd rather be Accurate than Either.

More later,

Fiction: Godbert

The Religion War By Scott Adams, Andrews McMeel Company, 2004

I can only think of the phone conversation going like this:

Scott Adams’s Agent: Good news! Scott wants to write a book!
Publisher (surrounded by Dilbert merchandise): Great!
SAA: He wants to make is a sequel to his “thought experiment” God’s Debris.
Publisher (less enthused): Oh. That’s . . . nice.
SAA: And he wants to talk about a future war between Christianity and Islam. Do I hear a thumping noise?
Publisher: That's only me slamming my forehead against the desk until it bleeds. What were we talking about?

And so it came to pass that I was at Half-Price Books, and found a stack of The Religion War on the table, and it took me a moment or ten to realize that the author was Scott Adams (the cover art tries desperately to obliderate the name). So I picked up a copy.

It’s a quick read, and Adam’s writing style is as open here as in his cartoons. Indeed, his pacing feels much the same way as his cartoons, complete with punchlines. But what he is doing is a polemic, much like the philosophers of the earlier eras would set up their arguments as a discussion between three characters – characters with names like Sympatico, who would offer the author’s views, Ignoranto, who would be a straw man opponent, and Judgementico, who would represent the reader but really just feed Sympatico leading questions.

Now, in God’s Debris, the protagonist was the world’s smartest delivery man, kin to Dilbert’s world’s smartest garbage man, who realizes everything is interconnected and sees the patterns in the world. Here he turns up as the Avatar, who as a result of this ability to make others see the patterns through simple logic, can convince anyone of anything. The Avatar wants to head off global armageddon between the Christian West’s General Cruz, and the charismatic Islamicist Al-Zee. He does this by force of his arguments.

Of course, the weakness of this is that you have to get someone who is willing to get into a discussion in the first place. Unfortunately, for the purposes of the book, this would result in the following discussion:

“Let me explain this to you”, says the Avatar
“No,” says the guard
“Bang,” agrees the gun.

And indeed, a lot of the book consists of characters acting like General Hofstedder in Hogan’s Heroes, shouting “Klink! What is this man doing here?!” But that’s OK, since characterization and plot is secondary to the message. The ending pulls God out of his Machine and resolves the plot with a feel-good 11th hour rescue, but that’s OK, because the resolution is secondary to the message. And the message seems to be – everything is interconnected, and if we just think about it, we’ll realize that. But we can’t think about everything, because we’re a part of it. Adams is much closer to Robert Anton Wilson and his Illuminati trilogy, so that anyone who has gone through those will find similar ground here.

So what we have here is another case of an author getting out of his assigned box (which is to be applauded), but producing something of odd duck of a product. And you know, that’s OK, since he has the throw-weight to do it. The book has the punch of a second-year philosophy major but without the invective and the source-quoting. I found it interesting but not world-changing. Your mileage may differ.

More later,

I Become Employed (But Check Back Later)

So yesterday I started a new gig. It is a contracted, hourly position for Pokemon-USA to help with their web site. The job has a contracted end date (right before Thanksgiving), and while I hope it will turn fulltime, I frankly don't know what's going to happen. So as in most things, I'm going to do my best and keep my ears open, and if anything major changes, I will pass it along. I had to bow out of some major potential freelance projects to take the position, but I am still doing a lot of short fiction, so I'm going to be busy (How busy? I'm thinking of retiring my World of Warcraft account).

Long-time readers know I rarely talk about the day-to-day in these entries. I will pass on that the offices are on the 20th floor of a skyscraper in downtown Bellevue, until recently known as the Rainier Plaza but now renamed for a new major tennant, a financial group (Lot of lawyers, lot of accountants, worlds collide on the elevators). It is, without a doubt, the nicest set of offices I have worked in as a game designer (remember, when I started at TSR, we were working out of a condemned hotel). The offices are near the top of the structure, and have a commanding view of the surrounding area (including Bellevue Square, Lake Washington and the Seattle skyline). So with a long (30-45 minute) commute and parking away from the building, I keep getting this strange vibe in the mornings, commuting from the home to the office. I keep humming the theme song from Bob Newhart (Buh-DUH-BeDUBbebah!)

Gotta go - Mr. Carlin and Mr. Peterson are coming over to talk about page maps. (Buh-duh-DUN-dehBAH!)

More later,

Dalek Song

Ow

Ow ow ow!

Ow.

More later (ow),

Local Politics

You try to get away, but they keep pulling you back in. Three things, all from last Friday.

First off, Dino Rossi, who has been saying he’s not running for Senator against incumbent Maria Cantwell for a while, officially announced he is not running for Senate (this actually got national play, but then again, so did Pink Floyd announcing they would not tour). He says it’s for family (And that’s OK), and that he can do more for Washington State as a governor instead of a senator (debatable, but wait for item #2). But of course, not willing to leave well enough alone, he had to put in a dig at Cantwell anyway:

"I think the people of Washington sense that they're not getting their money's worth with the incumbent," Rossi wrote. "She has proven herself unable to work across party lines, which does our state no good."

Which is pretty typical GOP-style, but is undercut by the timing of item #2 (which ran in an article in the Times right next to Item #1, but, fortunately for Rossi, did not include the above quote). Enron is cutting a deal over its gouging of the western states, and the pacific coast could see about 1.6 Bill coming back, (at the moment, its only confirmed at 22.5 Mill for Washington, but more to come) That ain’t chump change, and will probably go to making Washington State a better place to live. And the person who is credited for bringing in the money to Washington? Maria Cantwell. If this is what Rossi means by “Unable to work across party lines”, I hope she keeps it up.

Finally, a district judge, to no one’s surprise, overturned the top two primary currently in place. Righties and Lefties alike are overjoyed with this turn of events, since it keeps out those who might not be “pure of heart” from their proceedings. It is no secret I liked the “Blanket Primary” we had, since it encouraged the maximum number of people to get involved, and would actually tend to get people on the ballot who actually appeal to a moderate audience (Yes, there were righties who would vote for the most lefty dem in hopes to have a weaker opponent, but I think that’s a WMD argument – more fiction than reality, a political boogieman). Of course, with the replacement "Montana" Primary, you can still vote in the GOP primary if you're a Dem, but now you have to screw up the entire GOP ballot, not just one race. Hey, good going, there. So Dunn of the 9th and Edmonds of the 1st get to cry "do overs" and start again.

Oh yeah, and both sides declare that this has been argued from the standpoint of the “The political 'right of freedom of association”. This grinds me two ways. First, I thought the PEOPLE, not political parties, had constitutional rights. And second, how is it freedom of association to exclude people? Its that sort of post-millenial mental jujitsu that our establishment seems to relish in, that ends up with things like people having freedom of speech, but only if they exercise it far away from anyone who might listen.

OK, I’m done. I'm going to try to find something less painful. More later.

Gorillas & Garages

So I’m north of the city today, since Half-Price Books was having a warehouse sale. Pickings were slim and the quarters cramped, but coming back, I found the Crusty Buzzard (7221 Greenwood Avenue North) a used book store which had what I was looking for. While there, I passed a woman on the street with a table and a petition, and a sign labled “Gorillas, Yes! Garage No!”

I had to stop and ask. And I was presented with a petition against the Woodland Park Zoo building a large above-ground parking garage and convention center and closing the North Entrance of the Zoo in the process.

My curiosity satisfied, I said, “Thank you very much,” and turned away, not signing her petition.

To my back the woman said, “I guess he likes garages.”

Unfortunately, she did not wait for me to get out of earshot before unleashing her bon mot. I spun and, with a broad smile, said, “Actually, in this case, I do. I’m a zoo member, and one of the most difficult parts of going to zoo is parking. It clogs up all the local streets as well.”

The woman, a little embarrassed that I responded to her rejoinder, mouthed a quiet, “OK”, and turned back to someone who would allow themselves to be confused that a new garage would somehow be a bad thing for the great apes in their recently-renovated (and pretty cool) digs.

So, of course, now I have a new mission – to find out what’s going on here, and report back. Is more parking for our local zoo a Bad Thing, or merely another case of NIMBYism?

More later,

Update: So I did the research, and found out that not only the zoo has a pretty good plan, it also has been extremely responsive to the locals in putting together that plan. The original plan was to put a large underground lot in the south of the park, but after local input, moved above ground and to the west. Then they changed from a bid-build mode to a design-bid-build model after additional concerns. In addition to the lot, they are going to give the zoo workers better offices, create a better/bigger visitor center, and install a vintage carousel donated by the Allens.

None of this has anything to do with the animals. Even in the short time I have been here, Woodland park has been phenominal in bringing the animals out of cages and into more accessible, natural settings.Invoking the animal population to complain about this process is a scam, since a different population entirely is the one concerned about this (namely, those with good views of the park).

I continued down Greenwood after this encounter, and passed the zoo, on the west side, where they're going to put this lot. Traffic was slow from people searching for parking spots on the street, and the line to get into the zoo was about a hundred feet long along the sidewalk outside. So there is a problem, and it sounds like the zoo has a plan for it. I hope they are allowed to proceed.

More later,

This and That

This is short, because I'm up to some other things. A while back I provided a link for popularity of your Senators, so now we're going to do same thing for our State Governors. There are six GOP Govs among the top ten, and six among the bottom, so that's balance, I guess. The bottom ten include Washington's own Christine Gregoire (the local radio stations are still trying to put an asterisk next to her name), Arnold Schwarzenegger of California (what, you guys just voted him in, there's a problem?) and the scandal-wracked governors of Ohio and Alaska.

Oh, and someone named Yoyogod did a review of The Brothers' War on his site. I mention it because he says nice things about the book, and, more importantly, he demonstrates that I'm not the only guy writing reviews of books that have been out for a while.

More later, but right now up up to some other things.

Local Politics

And then they kicked me out of the 9th District.

No, no, wait. I am playing fast and loose with the truth. That's what happens when I don't get my official talking points.

I earlier mentioned both the Republican and Democratic held conventions in an attempt to avoid anything like democracy creeping into their choices for the the rejiggered King County Council. And I mentioned how the State GOP was having their hands full with two candidates in the 9th who are still running (Hammond and Dunn) after all the voting was supposed done and the State Dems have a similar problems with the 1st district (Edmonds and Ferguson). The two conflicts are different in the details - on the GOP side both candidates agreed that the loser would drop out. For the Dems, both stated they would stay in the race regardless of the outcome. Well, at least the Dems were honest with themselves.

And I was looking forward to watching a lot of the mailings and fireworks in the 9th District between organization darling Dunn and downcounty minister Hammond. I was particularly looking forward to the mailers. Sadly, it is not to be. I got my official voter's card (which you have to cut out using scissors, sort of like joining the Mighty Marvel Marching Society), and, lo and behold, I have been rezoned to the 5th District, which includes Parts of Renton, most of Kent, and SeaTac airport. And so I'm a little disappointed.

Now, to be fair, I really did think I was in the 9th. All the maps I saw were these little things that showed all of King County, so the exact borders were kinda flaky. I thought the edge of the 5th was Route 167. Or at worst Benson. But no, the border lies to the east, and I have been consigned to the 5th, not the 9th. Which is sad because I tend to identify with the more rural turf to the west of here than the housing developments, light industry, and superfund sites to the east.

Now here's the interesting thing - the new 9th has a long, chunky neck leading up to the population centers of southern Bellevue. Where a lot of developers are based. And the 9th also includes a lot of the land to the south and east, where the developers want to develop. So all of them are now in the same district, while towns that are going to have to deal with the increased traffic load (like Kent and Renton) are in another district entirely. Strange how all that worked out.

But that's not my worry, because I am in the 5th, which means I will be looking at Julia Patterson (Democrat, incumbant) versus Orin (Not Orson) Wells (GOP). And as things heat up, I will pass along the information. But I gotta tell you, this took a lot of wind out of my sails.

More later,

Seattle Sunday

One - A picnic birthday in Gasworks Park for Jana, with a view across Lake Union at the city, a brass band practicing, kites ranging from tiny to humungous, and four young people practicing their firedancing routines with unlit torches.

Two - An afternoon performance of Tai Chi at the Summer Festival in the International District, Kate and I and four other oldsters did 24-form, but the highlights of the event was the youngsters doing wu shu and sword forms. Nice.

Three - Dinner at Ivar's down on the pier, watching the ferries come in.

And those are three good reasons to stay in Seattle, folks.

More later.

Surfing the Development Wave

One of the advantages of doing a journal is that you can tell stories of your daily life, boring a maximum number of people in one sitting. And so I will.

This started a couple months back, when a couple surveyors showed up on our street. In this area of farmland-turning-to-development, surveyors are never a good sign to the long-time inhabitants. There was a gun man (the guy standing by the instrument, usually a real surveyor) and a stick man (usually a kid, who had the responsibility of walking around with the stick so the gun man can take sightings). (There used to be (when I was a stick man) a link man as well, who was responsible for measuring the distance from the gun to the stick, but modern technology in the form of laser-accurate theodolites sent him the way of the dodo). But I digress).

Anyway, the stick man (as stick men go) didn't know why they were doing what they were doing (which was to uncover and mark the right of way markers at the front of the property). "Something about putting in sidewalks". And indeed, soon afterwards a King County Construction crew came through, and filled in the drainage ditches in front of the house, scraping a chunk out of the hillside at the front of our horseshoe driveway, putting in an asphalt walkway and putting concrete curbs between the street and the new walkway.

And they moved our mailboxes, a trio of old battered rural boxes mounted on a metal pole, while doing this. We share this cluster with the Finks, two families from across the street (Fink is their last name - don't send me any mail on this). The elder Mr. Fink has lived here since 1957, and I really enjoy listening to him talk about the "old neighborhood" (He can't understand why the family who originally built this house built it so close to the road, and remembers when the corner lot (soon to to become 9 housing plots) was a orchard). Originally the mailboxes were on the left hand side of the driveway, in clear view of the Fink home - now they've been moved to the right.

As a result of the renewal out front, the Lovely Bride took advantage of the chance to put a stone wall in front of the horseshoe, where they scraped it away. This was an adventure in itself, since she ordered stone that she could lift, but they delivered stone that not only she could not lift, I could not lift, we could not lift together, we could not roll, nor could we load into a wheelbarrow (dented wheelbarrow offered as evidence)/ We also found we could not break into smaller rocks (I went at it with a sledgehammer and was rewarded with a shard of rock creasing my temple, ending the experiment). The end result of this adventure was that the Lovely Bride called in a professional to build the wall for us. Said professional was already working a job locally, had a bobcat, and assure the L.B. that this sort of thing happened more often than anyone really wanted to admit.

So we put in the wall right next to the moved mailboxes. And then we got a note from the Post Office saying that, because of the way King County re-installed the mailboxes, they were too low and too far from the curb for easy delivery. We would have to re-install them or lose mail service.

And the Lovely Bride went over to the Finks to find out if they got a similar note. They did, and Mr. Fink revealed that he had installed the original mailboxes way back in the 50s, and still had the tools from it (Tools, by the way, he bought with G.I. Bill, which ties in with the review of The Bonus Army, below). So Kate, sensing another handiperson/kindred spirit, proceeded to conspire with Mr. Fink to rebuild the mail boxes, raising them and bringing them further out to the road.

And this is the result -



Not bad. We all bought similar mailboxes down at the hardware store, the wood came from scraps from Mr. Fink's woodworking shop, Kate did the painting and put in the flower baskets. It actually looks really nice, and the mailperson sent us a thank you note (as opposed to cutting off service).

The punchline? Two days after this major project was complete, a surveying team showed up on the street again, once again marking out the right of way. The stick man was a kid, and said that it was about "putting in new sidewalks".

Here we go again.

More later,

Distant Thunder

I sat down this morning at the keyboard to the news of the London bombings ricoceting across the blogs. I know of no one who was in London at the time, but my heart goes out to the victims of the blasts and the citizens of London.

Then, another piece of bad news arrived, taking longer to arrive but more personal in nature. Scott Haring was in a car accident on the 4th which claimed the life of his younger son. Scott is best known in the gaming industry for his prodigious work with Steve Jackson Games and his column in Comics Retailer, but I got to know him at TSR, where he edited a number of projects and wrote the Republic of Darokin book for D&D Gazeteers and FR's Empire of the Sands. In addition to the loss of his son Scott has to undergo surgery from the accident.

Both Kate and I offer our deepest sympathy to Scott and his family in this time of loss.

More later,

Rambling Man

Feeling a little blue and out of sorts today, so here's a collection of bits and pieces in no particular order.

The Fourth was fun, with a big party at Monkey King's. The local weathermen had predicted overcast and rain for the evening, so, Seattle being what it was, it was clear and warm (the front finally rolled in last night, providing some much needed rain). The party was a pleasant afternoon talking to folk, and we unloaded a lot of books to send to soliders overseas (including Starfish so don't ask for my copy).

On the Academy (of Gaming Arts and Design) mailing list I'm on, a couple folk have complained that the Origins Awards did not list credits for the winning projects. Here's the short form for the RPG projects that won - anyone who wants to dig up the credits for the rest is welcome to:

Best Role Playing Game: Ars Magica by Jonathan Tweet & Mark Rein*Hagen (original creators), and David Chart (5th Edition design)

Best Role Playing Game Supplement: Eberron Campaign Setting by Keith Baker, Bill Slavicsek, and James Wyatt (Game Designers)

Gamer's Choice Award for RPGs: The World of Darkness by Mark Rein*Hagen and Stewart Wieck (original creators), Bill Bridges, Rick Chillot, Ken Cliffe and Mike Lee (Writers).

Actually, all this underscores the problem of crediting on the awards - who should get the credit? Traditionally they go with the cover credits, which are usually the game designers. Not only are there more individuals who deserve credit than the couple who are listed (developers, editors, playtesters, production, art are all vital, just to pull a handful off the top my head), the very definition of what rates for cover credit varies (Two of three winners are revised versions, so the original creators, who may not be involved in this particular version, get credit along with the current authors). World of Darkness, which evolved over a number of years, has 18 people credited for "Concept and Design" (many of whom I know). It's a thorny issue, and one that won't go away as games get as complex as movies.

In my world, the job hunt continues, and when I have something more concrete to report, I'll pass it on. I have taken advantage of this down time (when I'm not criss-crossing the country or cutting up Deadfall Maples) for more reading and game playing. I have moved my World of Warcraft characters forward nicely, but the cool thing that happened was on July 3rd, when we had a fireworks celebration. This was not organized by the company, but by a bunch of high-level players who all bought fireworks (available in the game) and held party in the Duskwood (which is continually shrouded by trees, making it a good place to set off fireworks in the day). I'd say there were about a hundred and fifty players present, cheering and dancing (yes, you can make your figure dance in World of Warcraft - each race has its own dance moves. Humans do disco).

On reading, I have a new problem - I'm reading faster than I review. I have yet to decide if I'm doing to write anything of China Mieville's The Scar or Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, but in the meantime, as a fallback measure, I've started the second of Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. THAT should slow me down.

Oh, yeah, The Lovely Bride read Varley's Mammoth, and contrary to my decidedly mixed review, really, really liked it, and recommends it. Of course, she likes the idea of baby mammoths (when we started playing Magic: The Gathering, she would send the Mammoth (named Chunky) over to attack, making Mammoth noises).

And finally, Washington State has its turn coming up for unique collectible quarter (The score so far: 23 lame ones, one winner - the Charter Oak Quarter from Connecticut). The local paper launched a contest to create the next Washington quarter. So naturally a group of photoshop geeks had to get into the act (Note- parts of this site of NSFW).

OK, that's enough rambling. More later,

Origins Awards

So the Origins awards were presented this weekend at the convention of the same name in Columbus. Readers may well remember the adventures of the Big Box, which involved coming up with the nominees for two of the catagories (Best RPG and Best RPG Supplement).

Here are the winners, announced over the course of the convention. Oh, and don't worry if you don't recognize some/all of the winners - the hobby game industry is pleasantly diverse and heavily sub-niched, so that miniature gamers, roleplayers, and card gamers are sometimes overlapping, often separate, markets.

Best Role Playing Game - Ars Magica: 5th Edition - Atlas Games

Best Role Playing Game Supplement - Eberron Campaign Setting - Wizards of the Coast

Best Play-By-Mail Game - Fall of Rome - Enlightened Age Entertainment

Best Historical Board Game - Sword of Rome - GMT Games LLC

Best Historical Miniatures Line - WWI: Western Front 28 mm - Brigade Games

Best Historical Miniatures Game - Dawn of the Rising Sun: The Russo Japanese War 1904-1905 - Clash of Arms Games

Best Board Game - Ticket To Ride - Days of Wonder

Best Miniatures Game - Attack Vector: Tactical Ad Astra Games

Best Miniature Line - Elmore Dragons - Dark Sword Miniatures, Inc.

Best Collectible Card Game - Seven Masters Vs. The Underworld - Z-Man Games, Inc.

Best Traditional Card Game - Cthulhu 500 - Atlas Games

Best Fiction Publication- Path of the Bold - Guardians of Order

Best Non Fiction Publication - Pyramid Magazine - Steve Jackson Games

Best Game Accessory - Cardboard Heroes Castles - Steve Jackson Games


Vanguard Award
Note: The Vanguards are selected by the members of the academy for design to reward innovation. It has been noted that revolutionary concepts in the industry often are not recognized in the traditional awards ceremony, often because there is no category for these what these products are. A good example of this is the Pirates game from the 'Kids, which blurs the line between Collectable Miniatures (you get pirate ships) and Collectible Cards (The ships are made out of punched-out pieces, which are sold like booster packs). Pirates is an innovative, revolutionary, and successful game, and did not even make it out of the nominating round in its category (Historical Miniatures).

All Wound Up - Twilight Creations, Inc.

Flames of War - Battlefront

Fire as She Bears! 2.1 - Starboard Tack Press

Pirates of the Spanish Main - WizKids, Inc


Gamers’ Choice Award
Note All of the above were voted in by members of the Academy (cost to enter the academy - free, but you have to show your gaming credits), much like the Oscars. The Gamers' Choices are like the People's Choices, in that they are open to the fans. I'd prefer to see all the awards be voted on by the fans, since the membrane between "fan" and "professional" is often wafer-thin. As it stands, though, two different games in the same category can get awards - a professional award and a fan award.

The Gamers' Choices were not listed by category, perhaps for that very reason.

Legends - Harlequin Games

Desert Rats – British in the Desert - Battlefront

Axis and Allies D-Day - Avalon Hill

A Call to Arms (Babylon 5) - Mongoose Publishing

VS System: Marvel Origins and X-Men VS The Brotherhood - The Upper Deck Entertainment

Cthulhu 500 - Atlas Games

World of Darkness Storytelling System Rulebook - White Wolf

Betrayal at House on the Hill - Avalon Hill

Hall of Fame
Duke Seifried
Mage Knight

Congratulations to the winners!

Novel: Creepy Deeps

Starfish By Peter Watts, TOR Books, 1999

I came to this book via Boing boing, an interesting and eclectic news site catering to the computer literate diginesti. The site was recommending the latest by this author, which is a continuation of a series. I found the first book of the series, used, At Powell’s in Oregon, and picked it up.

And its one of those books you’re glad to have read but not wouldn’t necessarily recommend to others.

Here’s the gist of it. It’s the near future, teetering on the edge of apocalypse world. Megacorps are in control and much of the population are in refugee camps on a tainted coastline. The mega-C’s have installed power stations in the deep trench smokers, where the continents butt together. And they staff them with modified transhumans capable of breathing water and withstanding the pressure.

And to staff these deep-sea dwellings they choose broken people – abusers, molesters, victims, people whom they can modify easily, and whom, if they fail, won’t be missed.

That right off the bat doesn’t do a lot for me, since all the characters are not people I would trust in my living room, much less roaming around unsupervised at the bottom of the ocean. And to Watt’s credit, he shows the losses from this badly thought-out piece of corporate creativity. Some of the crazy creeps go crazier. Some go an entirely new type of crazy. And some seem to go sane under the pressure.

Watts tries to make understandable these broken people, but does not make them sympathetic. This is a good thing from the reader’s standpoint, but in the process he also makes them difficult to tell apart. I thought this was just me at first, but I found the receipt for the book (Originally purchased at Barnes & Nobles #1964, Portland, Oregon) with crib notes from the original owner written on the back, writing up who all the characters are.

You never get close to these broken folk – there is too much distance, emotionally and evolutionarily, to get past. More frustrating, while the inmates of the deep sea asylum are coming to terms with their new role in the world, they are reduced to little more than witnesses for ANOTHER corporate screwup which drives the apocalypse at the end of the book.

The ideas and concepts in the book are intriguing, but in the end you realize you’ve been reading about one thing when the writer is setting you up for the ideas that he wants to talk about. And apparently these ideas continue in another book, but I can’t really say if I will follow him there.

More later,

Local Politics

Now it's the Democrat's turn.

A few weeks back the State GOP held a nominating convention with the intention of firming up their King County Council candidates in the face of the upcoming "top two" primary. The idea was to get one "official" candidate that would run as an (R), guarenteeing a Republican on the final ballot. Things did not work out as planned in the 9th District, which pitted establishment favorite Reagan Dunn against down-county minister Steve Hammond. Hammond won, and Dunn has yet to dismantle his campaign, and may still run, to the consternation of those seeking party unity.

And now the Dems have their own convention, with some similar results. Their Hammond-Dunn moments happened not down in this neighborhood, but rather up in the refurbished 1st District (Northwestern county, including Shorelinel), where two incumbents were pitched against each other. Carolyn Edmonds and Bob Ferguson both were on the council, Edmonds being the establishment favorite. Ferguson, on the other hand, supported the idea of the smaller council, and was outspoken in his crticism of the King County Elections Board. The plan was for Edmonds to take Ferguson out of the equation.

So of course, much like Hammond, Ferguson mobilized his ground game and beat the establishment favorite. Edmonds may choose to stay in the race (though she wisely avoided providing any Dunn-sized soundbites). And so the Dems in the 1st have the same problem that the Reps in the 9th have - the loser won't just stay down.

In the 9th (my district), the Dems went for Roger Larson of Bellevue. That made me wince a little, only because that's not going to play as well down in my rural territories. And the 9th is going to be the "swing seat" in that it includes big chunks of rural and urban landscapes. I don't know a lot about Larson (a quick Google turned up a couple letters to the editor and picture of him looking very stern at a ballot), but as I find out more, I will pass it along.

And speaking of of rural, the Dems came out of this process without even nominations for two of the more rural seats, the 3rd and the 6th. These areas tend to swing red, but even so not getting candidates on the bill is a failure of the the party. I mean, if you're going to go to all the trouble of hosting a convention to push your establishment candidates, the least you should do is get your establishment candidates lined up for all the slots. On the other hand, readers looking for a gig in the 3rd (Redmond and points east) and the 6th (Mercer, Kirkland, Bellevue) - here's a job opportunity just waiting to happen.

And, oh yeah, Christine Gregoire is still governor.

More later,

Nonfiction: Veteran's Day

The Bonus Army: An American Epic By Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, Walker & Company, 2004

I picked up this book back in February, at an appearance by co-author Paul Dickson. That adventure can be found here. So here's the quick version - The Bonus Day - is accessible and articulate and engaging, and turns a spotlight on a part of American History that has lay in shadow for too long, and in a way that seems all-too familiar at this point in time. Go read it.

Its a complex story that at its core is about what we owe to our fellow Americans who serve in our armed forces. Our Vets from WWI not only were being shot at, gassed, and plagued with disease, they were doing it at much lower pay than they would have gotten back in the states. To try to make up for arears, Congress announced it would pay its former vets a dollar per day served (Buck-Twenty-Five for time overseas), to be paid out far in the then-future. This payment became known as the "bonus". There were two ways to get the bonus. One was to live until 1945, the supposed payout date (this was passed 1924). The other was to die, and let your heirs get the money immediately. So the bonus soon known as the "tombstone bonus."

So a lot of vets had pieces of paper promising future payment, while the soup lines of the Depression got longer and things got worse. And number of the vets, among them Walter W. Waters of Portland, decided to take their case to the Capital for an early payout. Waters was one of those crucial pieces of the puzzle, an early organizer who became a recognized leader of the Bonus Army, without whom the whole movement would not have hit critical mass.

And critical mass it soon became, and would become 45,000 men, women, and children who headed for Washington to press their case. There were attempts to stop the marchers out in the hinterlands, but most state bureaucracies preferred to see the men move through their state and not stop. Some provided trains and motorized escorts to speed them on their way.

Another key player was DC police chief Pelham Glassford, newly placed in office to clean up the department. Glassford was a vet himself, and upon hearing of the huge number of vets about to descend on Washington, made arrangements for putting them up (as opposed to turning them out). Initially some abandoned government buildings were used, but soon Waters and other organizers set up military-style camps (one named Camp Glassford, and another Camp Marks, after another friendly officer).

The marchers came, and presented their case and lost - the Bonus failed to pass the House of Representitives. And instead of packing up and leaving, the marchers chose to stay. It was as easy to be poor and homeless in Washington DC as elsewhere. And after a few tense months, the government called out the Army under Doug MacArthur to roust them out. There was gas in the air and tanks in the street as the marchers were driven out of the city. It was an image disaster, as newspaper pictures of black smoke from the burning camps curling around the Capitol dome.

The book captures the complex nature of the conflict, and its players, and notes many things that are familiar to modern readers. The Government tried to tie the bonus marchers to Communism, as anyone who protested the government was an obvious commie or commie dupe (there were Communists among the marchers, but they were kept to another camp. Indeed, it seems like Waters himself was flirting with Fascism at a couple points in his running of the Bonus Army). In addition, when the eviction came, the competitive newspapers picked up the story, while the new, hot technology (the movie newsreel) was curiously silent on the matter.

Obvious analogies can be made between that time and this, Dickson and Allen work to be non-political, instead stressing the differences between the unemployed veterans and the official bureaucrats. While Hoover gets knocked about, FDR is shown to also argue against the Bonus. When the bonus passed the Senate, Roosevelt went along with it, but even then there was one last ironic kick. Some of the marchers were sent to a New Deal work camp in the Florida Keys, and, again thanks to how bureaucracy functioned, failed to be evacuated in the face of a major hurricane.

The Bonus Army was important, not only because of its campaign for the Bonus, but for its sense of controlled and organized civil disobedience. Protesters would ring the Capitol in a continual march, a far cry from today's "Protest Zones" put out of sight and out of mind. The Bonus Army paved the way not only for the 1963 March on Washington, but for the GI Bill, which provided a better future for hundreds of thousands of Veterans (including my father, who used it to get out of the oil fields of Western PA*).

It's very important, at a time when we are facing more veterans (and less funding) than ever, that we be willing to pay the financial price for their personal sacrifice. This sets an important step in our history in place, and I highly recommend it.

More later,

*My Grandfather was an independent oilman, and Dad would work on his drilling rig. They would often hit methane pockets and natural gas while drilling. Grandad smoked a pipe. After the third time Dad's eyebrows grew back, he started thinking about college. That's the way my Dad tells the story, at least.

While I Was Out

So I've spent the past few days trying to catch up, not only on work that was put aside during my Jersey sojourn, but also on the news of the day. Let's see - Stock market dropped about 200 points, Oil prices are up, We're still at war, We're still avoiding talking about how we "fixed" the data to get into the war, A leading Republican accused everyone who disagrees with him of being traitors. Christine Gregoire is still governor. So I didn't miss much.

And then there is this. One of the local alt weeklies is running its annual "best of" contests. And its a host of questions that will do nothing else but convince you that your life isn't really as interesting as you would want to it be (what's the Best Dance Club? Adult Movie Rental Joint? Washington State Red Wine?).

However, entry 9 is "Best Local Blog". And so, I'm thinking. I'm local, and this is a blog. In fact, I may be too local, talking about road widenings and trees coming down in the backyard, but be that as it may, I would qualify. And while my own little vanity vote isn't going to get me anywhere, if I rally the teaming masses (both of them) who read this site, then we may have a movement going on here. So let's freep this catagory - go vote for Grubb Street (grubbstreet.blogspot.com). Right now.

I know what you're thinking - there are other local blogs more deserving of this honor, and if I give you a moment, you'll think of one. And you're probably right, but they aren't huxtering for your vote, eh? And since a lot of the readers of this journal have their own journals, what's to keep them from voting for themselves? Nothing, but just remember I asked you first.

This, of course, is the danger of democracy - they let just anyone in. North of the Border, the CBC ran a show called "The Greatest Canadian" (no, it's not a contradiction in terms), with an open, popular vote, and some DJ in Winnipeg decided to campaign for himself. He made it to # 41 or so (I think he beat out Bill Shatner and Margaret Atwood, but I'm not sure). The CBC could have made a decision to exclude him, but instead gave him the placing, patted him on the head for his audacity, and went on with the countdown. So I'm sure that should Grubb Street win, the local weekly would be delighted to share that information with Seattle at large. And, by the way, if you're looking for "Best Steak House" I would recommend the Melrose Grill in Renton.

Adult Movie Rentals? You're on your own.

More later,

New Jersey

So I spent the week in the Jersey, outside Philly, visiting the Lovely Bride's extremely extended family. My mother-in-law, actress Nardi Novak, moved out there last year to be with friends and folk, and has a small apartment in Hi Nella. I spent most of my time out there driving from point A to point B, and nodding politely to family conversations (most of which seemed to involve how to best get from point A to point B). My Internet access was limited by Nardi's pokey computer and what little I had was spent mostly to get resumes out to computer game companies (thanks for Lady Gumdrop for a fist fulla leads).

Not that it wasn't fun out there. One of my lovely bride's cousins got married. Nardi killed in a excellent community theatre production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. We ate a lot of cheesesteak (one branch of the family founded Camden landmark Donkey's Place, which serves GREAT cheesesteak served on a kaiser roll). Went to the Jersey Shore (another cousin has a beach house at Sea City). I did a lot of nodding and tried to organize the collection of cousins, second cousins, third cousins, and levels of removal. They don't need a family tree, they need an org chart.

As for Jersey itself, the area south of Philly has a model railroad feel to it. The neighborhoods are small and tight and set in jewelbox fashion, and a fifteen minute drive takes you from the worst parts of Camden (Kate's first home was now a boarded-up relic in a neighborhood that looks like the set design of an August Wilson play) to almost-Disneyfied upper crust, with every class of neighborhood in between. While I joke that it always takes 45 minutes to get somewhere in LA, it always takes 10 minutes to get where you are going in South Jersey.

And so we're back. I've got a lot to catch up on. More later,

22

So in the past week a piece of legislation has popped up that has been grabbed by the lefty blogs with shock and anger. This is a pitch for a new amendment that overturns an old amendment – the 22nd.

The 22nd is the one that limits presidents to two terms. It got its start in 1947, in the wake of FDR’s death and officially joined the constitution in 1951. By overturning it, progressives fear, we open the door to “president for life”, and point to it as an indication of the conservative's desire to create our own King George. Never mind that four of the bill’s five sponsors are Democrats (Of course, the fifth sponsor is Sesenbrenner of Wisconsin, the sage head that turned off the microphones in a congressional hearing so he would not have to listen to people pointing out that the PATRIOT act was being abused).

But despite the concerns of the progressives and the presence of Sesenbrenner I am with the repealers on this. Supporters of the “In Party” have to deal with the fact that their guy cannot run again, regardless of their success, and therefore becomes a lame duck immediately upon re-election. The supporters of the “Outs” rightly point out that re-elected administration is EVEN LESS accountable in its second term now, since it doesn’t have to worry about reelection.

Actually, its even more frustrating that this. For the Ins, their operation becomes split between those who are going to see the lame duck through and then retire themselves, and those who want to keep going with whatever the next administration is. Instead of an imperial presidency, it’s a continual succession argument.

For the Outs it is little better, since there is no way to bring to bear the “will of the people” (or even the “will of the people who support the outs”) to bear. The only way to rein in a president is through Impeachment, which we think of as a “nuclear option” but as the most recent one pointed out, was little more than a “Vote of No Confidence”. Both Nixon's proposed impeachment (he resigned before things got going) and Clinton's full-blown case of impeachment fever happened in their second terms, when they supposedly had "nothing to lose". And today impeachment talk is in the air for a 2nd term president, this time from the disappointed Right Wing of the Ins party, angry at a deeply unpopular president. Would the various administrations have walked more carefully, and been more even-handed, had it been thinking of a strategy that lasted more than four years?

One of the great things about the Constitution is not only that we can patch it over time, we can change it again when the patch doesn’t work. Prohibition came into being to address basic problems in the country, yet it soon became obvious that the cure was worse than the disease, and Repeal, in the form of another amendment, followed. So too we can make our administration more responsible (or even force it to look more responsible) by getting rid of this lodestone. It was put into place by Outs (Republicans) who had been confronted by four terms (a lifetime) under the Ins (FDR Democrats) to "bring balance to the Force". And with the exception of Bill Clinton, its been the Republicans who have been nailed on the "no third term" law, hoisting themselves by their own political petard. The 22nd Amendment was a bad idea then, and it remains a bad idea now, regardless of who is in office.

More later.

Novel: Get Fuzzy

Mammoth John Varley 2005 Ace Books

I’ve been a John Varley fan for what seems like practically forever. OK, from the late 70s, at least, when his short stories started showing up in Galaxy Magazine. Cyberpunky before the genre even had gotten any traction, he wrote about a transformed solar system and posthuman development, its big novel being The Ophiuchi Hotline. He had an accessible style and advanced ideas and alien thoughts and his characters had a great way of taking everything in stride.

And he left the SF Business for a sojourn in Hollywood, a decade-long black hole that ended up with the production of a slightly average movie, but then he’s come back, and now, much like Poppy Z. Brite, is changing his act a little bit.

Mammoth feels like Varley’s movie book, his version of a film blockbuster, him doing Micheal Crichton, playing with science in a mass market sort of way. Its got the goods compared to Crichton, Cussler, and Clancy, but he makes me miss his crunchy near-future solar system goodness.

Here’s the general gist of it: Megabillionaire Howard Christian wants to clone a mammoth. His people locate one in Nunavut, frozen in the ice. Alongside the dead mammoth are two dead humans from 13000 years ago. Once of these humans is wearing a modern wristwatch and carrying a steel briefcase. And the story suddenly isn’t about mammoths at all (though they are a part of it throughout, including a young mammoth hybrid named Fuzzy), but rather about time travel.

And time travel stories have their own problems, usually revolving around the question of free will and predestination. In a free will universe, an open system, you create the problem of everything being negated though character action (“The reset button” that plagued a lot of Star Trek episodes). In a predestined universe, the only question is how you are going to put the blocks back together. Varley embraces the latter, and depends on some small cheats to pull it off – things disappear from the narrative text, only to show up later with an explanation of where they had been hidden, and why the characters (or the readers) did not have all the information. This is frustrating.

And there are more than a few holes in the plot. For example, if I (a billionaire capable of building a death ray into my humungous office building) find an anomalous body from the past that is an obvious time traveler, the first thing I do is run as many scans on it as possible to identify the body against a modern database, including anyone who is working around said time machine, regardless of whether I believe time to be an open or closed system. It sounds like Rule #2 of Time (Rule #1 is "Don't step on butterflies". But no one does thinks of this in the book (and we are supposedly dealing with real smart people in the book).

Now in the Crichton/Cussler/Clancy universe, this kind of stuff is expected. From Varley it’s a bit of surprise, and a frustrating one. The other problem is something that Varley does that is not akin to the other authors – he has characterization going on. Perhaps a bit too much characterization. The megabillionaire/badguy has enough quirks to make four movies with Christopher Walker – Howard Christian is a Howard Hughes/Bill Gates types with insecurities, a hard early life, a strain of kleptomania, a fetish for cars, a god complex, and a desire to be Batman. Varley's protagonists, Scientist Matthew Wright and elephant handler Susan Morgan, similarly have their quirks, and a five-year jump in the middle of the book allows everyone to evolve, or at least gain new quirks.

This is not Varley’s typical fair – he’s going in a new direction, and for that should be applauded. Oddly, the very things that have made him strong in his original works now prove problematic in his new field. Despite this he remains eminently readable and smooth. I'm just having trouble ignoring problems I would let pass in other "modern adventure technothrillers" (well, no, I would mock them as well, or avoid them entirely). But Varley gives me a higher set of expectations. This is the danger of any established author.

This is book really feels like it wants to be movie, and may have been a pitch once or twice. And it would be a good one. Perhaps that's part of the problem - Varley's earlier work was interesting and alien and utterly unfilmable (One painful attempt - Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, which was roasted by MST3K). Mammothone is down-to-earth, accessible, filmable, and almost pedestrian. And its a little bit more unsatisfying as a result.

More later,

There is Nothing Wrong

There is nothing wrong with your computers - I am a little overloaded at the moment with job search, some freelance, and with a host of family-related visits.

Communications will resume when I get my head strapped on straight again.

More later,

Flag Day

Yeah, it came as a surprise to me, too, and I only twigged to it because the Times did a review of a book on the evolution of the Pledge of Allegiance.

However, for your patriotic number-crunching enjoyment, here's a poll of the Approval/Disapproval Ratings for the US Senate. There are three Republicans in the top 12 (Two Senators from Maine and John McCain), and three Democrats in the bottom 12 (You can't really do a "top/bottom" ten, because there are ties). Washington State's Team Supreme are middle of pack. Former neighbor Rick Santorum? Number 93 out of 100.

More later,

Local Politics

This just in - Christine Gregoire is still governor.

And you'd think that after all the lectures after the 2000 and 2004 presidentials, the Republicans would lead by example and show how they are willing to move on, to coin a phrase. Instead, some of the rank and file have been beseiging the righty blogs, and, more interestingly, the local newspaper letter columns, not just with calls to organize, but rather with threats and promises that they will cheat like hell come the next election. Because my failure to find your fraud only justifies my future fraud.

I guess that means that if Michael Jackson is found Not Guilty of molestation, then the GOP Mayor of Spokane can put the moves on young men in a chat rooms. Hang on, Wait a minute . . .

But that's not what I want to talk about. Instead, let's talk about the State GOP nominating convention, which was this past weekend. Here's the story so far. It used to be that Washington State had a blanket primary, which meant that anyone could vote in either party's primary. The parties hated this, since it encouraged "mischief" - members of one party crossing the line to support the weaker candidate of the other party. So the 9th Circuit tossed it out. So what we have instead is a "top two" primary, which the says the top two candidates, regardless of party, go on to the general election. The parties hate this EVEN MORE, and are back in court to get rid of it. In the meantime the Reps (and later this month, the Dems - don't think they're getting a pass on this) are holding nominating conventions to put only ONE Republican (or Democrat) on the ballot. Everyone else is supposed to stay away.

So a nominating convention of less than 1d6x100 people per district is deciding who your candidate is. Oh, yeah, that's SUCH an improvement over those messy primaries.

For most of the newly-shrunk King County Council, there's no problem - there's one candidate from the establishment anyway. However, in the rebuilt 9th, there are two - Steve Hammond, and Reagan Dunn. Hammond, if you remember from early in this journal, was the "least crazy" of the candidates put forth to replace the late Kent Pullens (the other two were the ever-mobile Pat Roach and Phil Fortunato of the Great Big Signs). Reagan Dunn is the son of Congressperson Jennifer Dunn, and had the support of Mom and other party heavyweights. The loser would bow out, the winner would run as a Republican.

However, something odd happened that is not so odd. Favorite Dunn lost to Hammond. That shouldn't be too much of a surprise. While Hammond is a former minister and the more conservative of the two, a small convention is exactly the place where the more conservative party faithful come out in droves (that goes for the Progressive wing of the Dems as well). Hammond went to the mattresses, did the ground campaign and upset Dunn by a narrow margin.

So Dunn, golden child and rising star of the establishment, is bowing out as promised, right? Remember which party we are talking about? No, citing that Hammond has broken the 11th Commandment ("Thou shalt not speak ill of fellow Republicans"), Young Dunn is going to soldier on and run anyway. The party has threatened to go to court to prevent him from using the (R) after his name on the ballot. Great way to build solidarity.

And here's the kicker - there were more votes counted than there were delegates. I know, the Irony Gods are working overtime in Washington State. Instead of demanding an immediate revote, of course, the party swept it under the rug, noting that Hammond's victory margin was larger than the number of additional votes.

So this shows some of the weaknesses of nominating conventions as opposed to general primaries - even when you try to guarentee a result, the voting population will do what it pleases. There was an additional matchup, in the newly-jiggered 7th District, between incumbant Pete von Reichbauer and . . . old friend Phil Fortunato. Von Reichbauer discovered he had opposition only two days before the convention, and while he dusted Fortunato, 75-26, it underscored the dangers of complacency.

Open primaries were a smarter idea. And in a few weeks, the Dems get to reinforce this lesson.

More later,

Editing note: Went back in to correct a screaming typo - I originally said the Mayor of Seattle when I mean to say the Mayor of Spokane. The GOP Mayor of Spokane is the one promising government jobs to young men he picks up in chat rooms. The Democrat Mayor of Seattle, on the other hand, has been in Chicago talking with other Mayors about adopting the Kyoto Accords, which have been rejected by our national government (and accepting a "Most Liveable City" award).

The Week That Was

So, I'm a lumberjack (and that's OK).

In the end, we took down and sawed up four trees from the Deadfall Maples (naming rights still available), cropping it to a six-member group. First fell a dead snag in the wind, then the second tree in full leaf, then we took down two more dead snags, because when they fell, would have done serious damage to the house or brought down still more trees.

And by "we", I mean myself, my Lovely Bride, and my extremely competent next-door-neighbor Ron, who provided the gas-powered chainsaws, had them sharpened up, and called dibs on the largest of the fallen trees. In exchange, all the wood from the downed trees is going to his woodpile, which should keep his kitchen fireplace going well into the next decade.

There were a few adventures. We dropped one of the snags accidentally on top of the Aztec Temple Grill (also a good name for your band), and smashed some bricks, but given that the darned thing was put together without mortar in the first place, it was easily repaired. We moved the bronze cat birdbath out of the way of where we thought the tree would come down, and, of course, almost dropped the tree right on the new spot.

So, we sawed up the trees. We hoisted the stumps back into a relatively artistic arrangement. The Lovely Bride gathered up the leaves and branches and put them in the back part of the lot, which is our widerness area/briar patch/composting site. Then I mowed the lawn to get all the stragglers. Then a heavy rain hit to help drive down the sawdust. The casualties are a bent gutter and a smashed set of lawn furniture.

And I, for one, am exhausted the day after finishing all this.

More later,

Dave Sutherland

Veteran TSR artist and cartographer Dave Sutherland has passed on. As a fan I remember him for his art in the very young days of TSR (The cover of the original Monster Manual, the first Empire of the Petal Throne). As a co-worker I remember him for pushing the our maps in new directions (The 3D maps of for the first Ravenloft, not to mention that the Ruins of Undermountain maps came from his campaign). As a friend I remember him for his kindness and warmth and engagement with everyone around him.

More later (I guess),

The Inauspicious Week Continues

And then the second tree fell over.

I mentioned earlier the Deadfall Maples (still available as the name of your rock band) at the NW corner of our house. The Deadfalls are a combination of dead snags and live trees growing from a common stump. The stump, however, has started to rot, so we have realized for a while that they would have to come down.

On Sunday, one of the snags, a pole about 30 feet long, bounced off the house, and thundered to the earth, missing the patio furniture by a few feet. We sawed up what we could with our dinky electric chainsaw, and called our neighbor, who is a wonderful guy with all these cool tools.

So yesterday, at dinner, I heard something go "thump" outside. I had the chance to turn to Kate and say, "Did you hear something?" when the second tree of the Deadfall Maples fell over. This was a live tree, heavy with leaves and seeds, about 70 feet high, and it thundered to earth in a slow, majestic fashion. It was like watching the Titanic go down.

It didn't hit the house. Instead it smashed the patio set into little plastic pieces.

Here's what happened - the first tree, though dead, was supporting the other trees in the cluster. When it fell over, that support went away. The second tree was OK with its canopy of leaves and seeds, but the added wieght of a day-long rain was too much for it, and brought it down.

So now we have TWO trees knocked over in the backyard- one partially sawn up and the other in full leaf. So that's what I'm going to do later today.

And yeah, we called the neighbor with the cool tools.

More later,

This Just In . . .

Christine Gregoire is Governor of Washington.

After seven months of relentless public bloviating and serpentine legal maneuvering by our local Republicans, Judge Bridges of Wenatchee County has dismissed the State GOP challenge of the election, and soon following, candidate Dino Rossi conceded the election with only a quarter of Gregoire's term completed. Rossi and the State GOP surprised many by chosing not to pursue the case to a higher court, but I think this was primarily because Judge Bridges laid a mighty smackdown upon the Republican's case, dismissing in its entirety and "with prejudice".

I really don't know what stronger terms he could use - if he had dismissed it "with extreme prejudice", he would have had to launch himself from the bench and physically beat the GOP lawyers about the head and shoulders with his little gavel. He ticked off the Republican charges and in turn, showed them without merit from the evidence presented in court.

Mind you, the case was in Wenatchee in the first place because the State GOP went shopping for a friendly venue. Further, the judge admitted all the forms of shakey evidence that the state GOP wanted in, allowing them to present their "proportional theories" of cherry-picked data. And the judge telegraphed from the start what he expected to be presented as clear evidence (he did not go as far as to say "This will be on the Final Exam", but he should have). And even with all this, the GOP could not make its case. They cried "fraud" long and loud, but when it came time to put the data on the table, they had nothing, and the Judge knew it.

There was no smoking gun, nor even a damp squib. The GOP's lawyers not only did not pull back the curtain to reveal the Great and Powerful Oz, they couldn't even find the curtain, and instead took on the appearance of a chimeric combination of Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Lion, wandering the streets of the Emerald City and accusing random bureaucrats of being the Wizard.

The Democrats, for their part, did their homework, possibly in part because they didn't spend all their time on talk radio predicting victory. The Judge did disallow a handful of votes which the Dems showed were illegally cast by felons - four of them for Rossi. This was the court's way of saying "see, this is how you make a case". And probably the finest moment for the Dems was reading into the record a quote from the GOP Chairman Chris Vance, declaring how fair and honest he thought the King County elections were (mind you, this was when Rossi was ahead, and he was pressuring Gregoire to admit defeat - since then, Vance has been the go-to guy for poisonous accusations).

Not that the Dems should get off scot-free (though wiping the sweat from the brows is perfectly understandable at this point). While the King County did OK, there are still holes in the system which we can plug (and in part is being pushed by our Secretary of State). While the system worked much better than other parts of our great country (such as, oh, say, Ohio, where the political stench is just getting worse over time), we could tune things up better. And by "we" I mean everybody, because both sane Republicans and Democrats benefit from fair elections.

Now the State GOP and its hate-talk allies are in fallback mode - it was never about the Governorship, it was about exposing all the problems in King County's election board (and blaming it on County Executive Ron Sims, who, surprise surprise, is coming up for re-election). The judge was obviously partisan by demanding facts. And while Rossi could have given a proper congratulations to the Dems in a "The people have spoken, and the court has confirmed" speech, instead told everyone that he was abandoning the chase only because he didn't think he'd get a fair trial at the Supreme Court level (as opposed to before a judge in a Republican county). At that point Mr. Rossi lost me - that was tooth-grindingly tactless and wrong, but very much in the standard playbook of baseless accusation.

Now here's the interesting thing - the Washington State election Challenge has been a caus celeb not only within our borders, but nationwide, and the National Republicans have raised money based on those "evil, evil Democrats" who believe in these radical concepts like "counting votes" and "not rolling over". And I can only assume they have had some success in fundraising. The question is - where did the money go? Because they definitely didn't use it for their legal team.

Maybe they invested it in collectible coins and beanie babies.

More later,

An Inauspicious Start To The Week

Both Sunday and Monday were busy, but for different and almost completely opposing reasons.

Sunday I went up to the U-District to work at the Suzzalo Library alongside the Monkey King. Suzzalo has this huge, Hogwartsian reading room which reminds me very much of the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittburgh, but with better lighting. I completed a short story in this quiet place without an Internet link, and when we took a break, I learned of the strangeness that is bubble tea at a local coffee shop.

Then I, the Monkey King, Shelly, and Frabjous Dave went to the Circus. Well, actually we went to The Circus, the 1928 classic silent film that got Charlie Chaplin an Oscar. This played to a packed house at the Neptune, as this was the film every SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) fan wanted to see. And it was brilliant and great and the entire house was completely under a spell cast almost eighty years earlier. Amazing stuff.

Then we adjourned to the Big Time Pizza for slabs of 'za and beer, including a Triple Boch that left me partially phased with another, cotangent plane of existence. And that was OK, since I also discovered that the Frabjous One was a serious Shakespeare conspiracist, and he put forward the best argument that Edward DeVeres authored the Cannon that I have ever heard in a bar while I was partially fused to another plane.

And so I returned home late and happy, only to discover that a tree had fallen on my house in my absence.

It was not a major disaster. We have a stand of maples near the northwest corner of the house - some living, some deadfalls (and "Deadfall Maples" is a great name for a band, if you looking for one - just remember to send me a check for its use). With the neighbor two houses to the west leveling his forest out front, the maples are now getting a lot more wind, so it was only a matter of time before one came down. It bounced off the house, tearing a shingle and bending a gutter, then bounced off the balcony railing, taking out a window box, then plummeted to earth, destroying a flower pot, bending a pink flamingo, and missing the patio furniture by about a foot. So really, there was little damage that we've found.

However, we have a big tree in the backyard, and I spent the bulk of the day sawing up what I could and collecting and disposing of the branches. I still have a huge log in the backyard, but I have to get a bigger chainsaw.

And that's been my Sunday and Monday. I have a feeling it's going to be a weird week.

More later,

Evil Alien Devil Squash

There is a lot on my mind at the moment, so for the moment, enjoy this Evil Alien Devil Squash!

More later,

Our Chi Is Mighty

Though I will admit that I look like James Bond villain in the picture below, with the Lovely Bride as my villainous and brilliant chief scientist, actually it is the pair of us in our Tai Chi uniforms:



The occasion was "A Glimpse of China - Seattle Chinese Art and Culture Festival" at the Seattle Center House. For those of you not from the area, the Seattle Center is Seattle's chief cultural hub - the original site of the 1964 World's Fair and still-home of Seattle landmark, the Space Needle. The Center is the site of the ballet, opera house, several theater companies, the Science Museum, the Experience Music Project, and Key Arena (home of the basketball champions Seattle Storm, and, oh yeah, the Sonics).

Anyway, about 20 of us from the Chinese Wushu and Tai Chi Academy were performing the 24-form in our white silks, and we held together pretty well. Our Chi was mighty, and no one fell over. I don't have any photos of our performance, because I was repulsing the monkey with the rest of the group. When the photos show up at the academy's site, I will provide a link.

But the stars of the presentation were not us oldtimers, but the Jedi Younglings:



The kids performed some amazing moves, are more limber than I ever was, and, oh yeah, have cooler uniforms.

Not that I'm jealous, mind you. For such feelings lead to the dark side.

More later

Fist Fulla Movies

I have a horrible approach to watching movies - I don't catch the film when it comes out, then I wait a week so there isn't as many people there, then wait a couple more weeks for it to hit a budget theater, then wait a couple months for it show up on DVD, then don't rent the DVD, then flip past the edited-for-television version in order to catch a rerun of Iron Chef. While I recognize the triumphs of the art of cinematography, I am exactly the type of consumer that makes movie moguls pound their heads against their desk until bloodstains start appearing on their blotters.

But with my recently-altered circumstances, I have a little more time on my hands and a little more desire to get away from my home office (the walls do start to close in after a while). So I have seen four honest-to-goodness modern films in the past month.

Hitchiker's Guide the Galaxy was OK. Just that, OK. It was amusing and well put together, but as I watched it I came to realize that knew all the jokes. Including the jokes that I had sworn I had forgot. I enjoyed the radio show, and the books, and the TV show and the breakfast cereal, and as I progressed through the film, I had this definite feeling of deja vu. I knew where we were going, like a production of Shakespeare that you've seen in different forms. Now you're just watching to see how they pull it off. A friend suggested that, before going to see a movie, I should hit myself in the head with a shovel so as to drive all such facts from my brain and just enjoy the film.

And for Sahara, I did just that, going to see it the day after the boom was lowered upon me (head, meet shovel). This is a goofy adventure movie that operates under the idea that if you just keep loading stuff up, no one will really question what is going on. There are plot holes the size of civil war ironclads in this, but it marches smartly along, feeling at times like an episode of "Miami Vice" with a redneck rock soundtrack. As an added bonus, you get Penelope Cruz as the World Health Organization scientist/hottie (you can tell she's smart - she wears glasses in a couple scenes). The Lovely Bride, who has a thing for this type of movie (she rented National Treasure while I was out of town, for similar reasons) had the most telling review: "It gives you the experience of reading a Clive Cussler book without having to, you know, actually READ a Clive Cussler book."

And then we watched Hellboy together on DVD, which was left here by Brainstormfront when he moved back to Wisconsin, and it was a bit of a letdown. Maybe the move to a slightly smaller screen did it in, but it felt stilted and empty. Great visuals but sort of a hollowness at the heart of it all. And I would be just the person to like a movie that mixes together Nazis, Cthulhoid monsters, and Jeffrey Tambor (who stole his scenes).

And lastly, yesterday, Revenge of the Sith. No way I can give this a fair shake, since I've been hip-deep in Star Wars for the past year and so was privy to a lot of bits that had not been revealed (for example, in an early draft - Darth Vader was to be revealed to made of chocolate. Darrrrrk chocolate). And most of the people I know were separated into hostile camps of "Doesn't Suck" and "Fooled Again!". Parts I liked (Obi-wan's humor in the opening sequences), parts I didn't care for (the tooth-pulling dialogue). All in all, it felt like going to Easter Sunday Sermon - you know you're going to have to go, you know what's going on, and you're there for societal reasons as much a spiritual ones. Episodes I-III seem to operate for me as the ultimate ret-con (retroactive continuity). If you watch all the films in correct order, you will find everything in Episode IV revised, changed, or deepened (right down to Luke looking off into the double sunset, or 3P0's comment of "Thank the Maker"). Its an interesting time-loop that has been set up, where the original generation's experiences with the film series will not line up with those who approach it in final running order.

In the meantime, pass me that shovel - I think I'm going to see more films.

More later,

Novel: End of the World as We Know It

War of the Worlds: New Millennium By Douglas Niles, Tor Books, 2005

I don't normally review books written by friends. No, hang on, that's wrong - I regularly review books written by friends, when said books are in the process of creation, that morphic ur-state when the language can still be strengthened, the blocking altered, the dialogue sharpened and the furniture moved around the room. And such reviews generally consist of a face-to-face conversations, the criticisms cushioned by numerous pints of some local brew.

But this was one I was interested in, and a mutual friend sent me an advanced uncorrected proof. I've been a fan of the H.G. Wells original and loved both the Classic Illustrated comic book version with its bolts and rivets Martian tripods and the 1953 movie with its low-hovering melted jellybean ships. So this is a book I would have wanted to write.

And Doug has done SUCH a good job with it.

You know the basic (now public domain) plot. Mars invades Earth, sweeps aside the wonders of modern civilization, but in the end is defeated by a small thing they had not anticipated. That's where Doug starts, and builds anew, keeping much of what you expect and adding new twists of his own. If anything, Doug captures the extreme fragility of our early twenty-first century life, so tenuous that a good hard knock or three can push it over the edge. That fragility (along the hubris created by our advanced society) is one of Wells' original themes, and Doug expands upon it.

And Doug does more, bringing the basic plot up to 21st Century sensibilities as well as technology. Instead of the anonymous narrator of the original, Doug splits the tale between first person narration by Mark Devane, a former professor-turned-reclusive writer in the wilds of Wisconsin, and the third-person experiences of his daughter Alexandria, project manager of the Manned Mission to Mars project. Mark is gives the ground-level view of survival in a desperate, uninformed world, while Alexandria moves among the ranks of surviving terran power, aiding in the frustrating and futile attempts to repel the Martians. The plot moves elsewhere, with other characters and minor vignettes, but always returns to Mark and Alexandria.

This is a wedding of technothriller with classic science fiction. The understandable parts of the science and technology are there, right down to the reliability of old tech over new (one of the male heroes of the book flies an old A-10 Warthog, and ancient Harleys and classic cars survive the Martians' first assault). Yet overlapping this is the unexplainable nature of the Martian tech - we don't know how they do what they do, but believe that they are doing it. Wells' Martians were terrors of their age but look like quaint tripedal boilers today. Doug has brought back the terror they inspired.

Also, against the original text (and most technothrillers) there is a layer of character development and envolution, particularly in Mark's character. He flees society after an earlier nervous breakdown but with the Martian Invasion has to come to terms with his own need for society and his own role in the new world. This takes it the story above the level of your typical technothriller into a finer form of fiction.

A word of warning - I brought this book with me when we went on vacation. The worst place to read about the initial Martian attacks was while waiting on the tarmac in Vegas to take off. Let's just say that commercial aviation takes a shot to the heart.

More later,