Day of the Dead

Have you noticed how wonky our holidays are? They seem to have evolved from their original notions into things very different from what was originally intended. The obvious ones are Christmas (Celebrating the birth of the Savior with the arrival of Santa Claus) and Easter (Celebrating the death of the Savior with Bunnies and Chicks), but I'm starting to think that all holidays have their own secret history. Heck, even Mother's Day originally had an anti-war component to it, before Hallmark got ahold of it.

And then we have Memorial Day.

Memorial Day is an interesting challenge because we can't say for sure WHERE it came from. A quick run through the web turned up that it was first celebrated by a) Liberated slaves in 1865 at a Charleston SC racetrack that had been a prison camp and mass Union grave during the war, b) Natives of Boalburg, PA who were decorating the graves of the recent war dead in 1864, c) Women of Columbus MS who were tending to the graves of the Confederate dead and chose to extend the same courtesy to the dead of the Union army, or d) War hero John "Black Jack" Logan of Waterloo, New York in 1868. The last one is the official one, but it in turn is admitted to be based on earlier Confederate Memorial Days for their war dead.

And it wasn't even called Memorial Day, but rather Decoration Day, and it was intended to clean up and leave flowers at the graves of Union soldiers. The general time for a seasonal cleaning for the honored dead makes sense (fresh flowers are available, and the long grass needs mowed about that time), but I have yet to find a reference as to why it had to be May 30th, though it was the conclusion of the Siege of Corinth, where Logan led a brigade.

Initially, Decoration Day (Memorial Day started popping up in the 1880s, but didn't get the national nod under 1967) was solely for the Union dead, and the Confederate dead had their own memorial days, varying according to state. After WWI, the doors were thrown open for all the American war dead, and the US South began to commemorate the day as well after WWII. In 1968, it was moved from May 30 to the fourth Monday of May, which provided the handy three-day weekend that most people connect with the holiday. As of 2000, the government asks for a National Moment of Remembrance at 3 PM.

Memorial Day, more than a commemoration of those who have sacrificed in battle, has evolved into the official, governmentally-sanctioned start of summer (Labor Day is the other bookend of the season). The Indy 500 belongs to it, and every major city seems to have its Folk Festival this weekend (no lie - I was on the phone with my mom in Pittsburgh yesterday - she mention the Pittsburgh Folk Festival is downtown, and I responded that Folklife is out at the Seattle Center as well).

This does not sit well with some Vets, who feel the commercialization hides the true meaning of the day. And, indeed, where are the Fox blowhards thundering about the "War against Memorial Day"? (Answer: They're out on their boats). The vets would like to move the day back to the 30th, so the sheer inconvenience can remind people that there WAS some sacrifice here, and not just so you can haul out the grill for the first time this year. And I agree with the sentiment, but I just get frustrated trying to figure out why the 30th was chosen in the first place, and where the holiday really came from.

More later,

Movie: Oh My Stars And Garters

X-Men: The Last Stand Directed by Brett Ratner, written by Zak Penn and Simon Kinberg*, starring Hugh Jackman, Halle Barry, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Kelsey Grammer, and a surprising number of Victoria's Secrets models.

I really liked this one. It surprised me that it did. Halle Barry as Storm actually showed her chops as an actress. Ian McKellan's Magneto and Patrick Stewart's Professor X could be hosting a talk show on Fox and command complete attention for two hours. And Kelsey Grammer as the Beast . . . well.

OK, I really didn't know what to expect on this one, and readers here know that I am a fan of the beautiful blue-furred Beast, but Grammer just nails it. Either he's a big comics fan from the same age that I hale from, when Hank McCoy was strong, agile, thoughtful AND humorous, or he's done his research. I expected the Beast to have a secondary role, much like other comic mainstays like Colossus, but he was a key figure, embodying one of the major plots, and portrayed incredibly well. I was impressed.

And the movie stayed mostly true to its material, though it takes that material in different ways with unexpected (though perhaps more realistic) outcomes. The period it harks back to is the post-Jim Shooter, post-John Byrne, still-Chris Clairemont X-men (author Clairemont has a cameo in the film as "Man with Lawnmower". Stan Lee is "Man with Hose"). We have a whole fistful of plots all playing out at once. The threat is Magneto's mutant terrorists. No, wait, the threat is that Angel's father has come up with a "Mutant Cure". No, wait, the threat is that Jean Grey is back from the dead as Dark Phoenix and is disintegrating people. And then there's a pair of relationship triangles. And Magneto and Professor X both pushing their own agendas. There always has been a great ethical murkiness with the X-Men and the whole "Mutant Problem", and the movie embraces that murkiness. By the end of the film you're saying "Charles Xavier is right, but . . ." and "Magento is a bad guy, but his point is valid . . . "

It's philosophy in spandex. And the plot unspools neatly and quickly AND the fight scenes are choreographed well, in that they are have a structure and it is clear where the characters are what they are doing, as opposed to just a collection of high-speed wire stunts and CGI. AND everyone gets their moment - its closer to an ensemble cast than the story of one particular character. Colossus, Kitty Pryde, Mystique, Iceman. Heck, even Jamie Maddrox, the Multiplying Man, gets a good bit.

The thing is, I'm enjoying this film at the same time as I'm dumping most of my X-books from the weekly buy. The mighty marvel mutant marching society has been spiralling out of control for me for years, producing some interesting tales (Grant Morrison's extremely weird tenure) but mostly just line maintenance. A writer will get on the book, add his favorite X-Men from his personal golden age, advance a few ideas, then be replaced by another writer, who brings on his favorite characters and ideas. Rinse and repeat. Even Clairemont's latest version deals with characters that I don't really care as much about. The breaking point was a nasty little mini-series called "Deadly Genesis", which retconned into the mythos another set of X-Men, gave Cyclops another long-long brother, killed off a favorite old-timer X-Man, Banshee, and firmly established Professor X as being a complete cad. So I'm down to Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men (though he is deeply engaged in "torture the characters" mode, so the clock is ticking on him) and Peter David's new X-Factor, which seems to be the source material for the Multiplying Man's character in the film.

Anyway, this is a good movie to catch - the Summer Blockbuster, a fun afternoon. You can follow it even if you don't have "Geek" on a second audio channel, but you do have to pay attention. And, of course, the Beast is really cool.

More later,

*Interesting thing - I started this writeup last night, after seeing the movie, using the Imdb for names and spell-checking. On Friday night, the screenwriters were listed. As of Saturday morning they were missing. Will someone seeing the film check to see if there is a script credit on this film?

Dave Mendez

Presenting newly-minted King County Sherrif's Deputy Dave Mendez!

Flanking Dave are the Lovely Bride and Gaming Visionary Steve Miller. As they play RPGs with Dave, this means they get +2 to hit him because they are flanking.

More later,

NSA

Typical Americans - first you're upset that your government isn't paying attention to you, and THEN you're upset that the government IS paying attention to you.

Got a question? Why not ask them about it?

More later (Oh yeah, this is going on my permanent record),

A Little Self-Promotion

So a number of things have popped up recently which I want to tell you about.

First off, I received a copy of the tentative cover for the Beowulf short story collection. My contribution to the collection is "Beowulf and the City of the Dark Elves". The collection, edited by Brian Thomsen, contains stories by Ed Greenwood, Lynn Abbey, and Wolfgang Baur, better known to the readers here as The Monkey King. It will be coming out at the end of the year.



Second off, Dyvil: First Edition , my infamous 30-Minute RPG, is now for sale at the following fine on-line shops - RPGNow.com and DriveThruRPG.com. For those of you that missed out on getting it for free, here's your chance to spend digital money for it.

Lastly, a while back, I was contacted by Dragonlance chronicler Michael Falconer about the origins of the gods of Dragonlance, which had evolved out of the gods from my original D&D campaign. I told him that if I ever found my original notes, I would send him a copy. Well, I did find them, and I did send them, and he has posted them here. On one hand its an interesting look at the foundations of the DL mythos. On the other hand, it was written over 25 years ago, when I was college, and it looks it. I mean, parts of it are positively painful (I'm talking about demigods whose names are the Beatles spelled backwards - ideas so bad that it never really got any traction in my campaign). So its a good look at the Burgess Shale that was pre-Dragonlance, and makes me appreciate everything that has been done to and for it since.

More later,

Gozer

Remember what I said about cat vacuums? No, not an appliance to vacuum your cat (though that's a darn fine idea) but the fact that the universe knows when you have insufficient cats in your house and provides new ones to take up the slack. Well, its happening again.

Once we were a three-cat household - Rogue, Longshot, and Emily. Both Longshot and Rogue passed on, and we thought we would let Emily be an only cat for a while (she was a hot-tempered calico). Then Brainstormfront moved back to Wisconsin, and we gained two more cats - Harlequin (Harley) and Victoria (Vicky). So we were back up to three.

And then Emily passed on, and we were fairly comfortable with a two-cat household, particularly since Vic and Harl were used to each other. Then, on Tuesday, our friend Charles called. He and his wife Tammy and two kids were relocating to England for a new job. They had thought they had done everything in a timely manner to arrange for their cat to come with them. Well, there were some hitches, and the soonest the cat can join them is August. And their plans to have the cat stay with relatives back east fell through. So they were looking for someone locally who could take in a cat for a few months.

And we become a three-cat household again.

The new cat's name is officially Sparks, since she was found as a kitten during a lightning storm. But soon she gained the unnofficial name Gozer, as in Gozer the Gozerian from Ghostbusters. And, yeah, looking into her kitty eyes, she looks like the kind of cat that would be summoning Elder Gods in the basement when you're sleeping (By comparison, Harley looks like she is thinking of her next meal, and Vic like she has ALREADY conquered the world, thank you very much). Gozer is a tortoise-shell tabby with just a spot of calico, her medium length hair has a silvery sheen to it.

Every cat is different in my experience, and Gozer has already surprised us. She's a climber and an explorer. We put her in the laundry/furnace room the first day, and she immediately climbed into the most inaccessible spot in the room, on top of the furnace ductwork, a spot she could only reach by crossing the ceiling on half-inch wide pipes. Now, there is a small space in the far corner of the ceiling where she could conceivably get under the house itself, if she swings under two more sets of pipes and squeezes through a two-inch opening. So we aren't keeping Gozer in the laundry room anymore - just to be safe.

Relations with the other cats are slow and ongoing. Vicky doesn't like the new arrival one bit, and as I write this, the two are on either side of my feet, growling in low tones at each other. If my ankles get shredded before I finish this entry, I'll tell you. Harley is curious but unconcerned, as Gozer is not bringing her food. Both Harley and Vic are larger than Gozer, but Goze still has her front claws. In addition to her tendency to get onto the ductwork, Gozer likes to perch on the backs of chairs, chase the light-pen dot across the floors, and hates harmonicas (I only know this from Charles' report, and have yet to try it myself). She sleeps like a rock, her legs a tangle underneath her, and she rises at dawn, which is currently 5 AM up here, which delights the Lovely Bride to no end.

So we are back to three cats, at least for the moment, and are dealing with the uneven settling process of cats determining their place in our reshuffled pride. I'm good with is as long as they realize that I am one of the pride leaders (hanging out with the Lovely Bride, or as the cats call her, the Food Goddess). So there will be some growling in the immediate future (and only some of it from the Lovely Bride being woken up at 5 AM)

More later,

President Gore

Al Gore is back in circulation, promoting an new environmental movie, and with him seems to have come almost a national level of buyer's remorse about the current inhabitant of the White House. It is almost like the entire nation ran into its old girlfriend who they jilted at the prom, and discovered she's thinner, fitter, smarter, and cooler than the person they DID take. The highpoint of the return of Al was last week on Saturday Night Live, where they did their cold opening with a speech by "President Gore" - Here's one of the many versions you can find on the web.

He looks fit. He looks relaxed. He looks happy. He looks like he's having fun. Where is that stiff, pedantic, grim figure that the press foisted on us back in 2000? Of course, one of the reasons he looks relaxed is that he hasn't had to lead the country for the past six years. And the SNL bit, while amusing, does underscore the mental image that "everything would have been better" if only we had taken the path less traveled.

Oddly enough, I had my own Al Gore Presidency bit written up. A local cartoonist for the PI had a "burning question" that he does every week, and a few weeks back it was "What would the Gore Presidency be like?". From the response, he mostly heard from wingnutters accusing him of treason for even thinking about it. I sent in my take, but it was a bit long, and wasn't used. So here is what I think would have happened (sorry, no glaciers in Maine).

The Albert Gore presidency (2001-2004) has been compared to both the elder George Bush and LBJ presidencies. In all three cases the chief executive had to deal with his predecessor's problems while being compared unfavorably to that predecesssor by the press and the nation at large. Inheriting a weak economy, Gore helped create a shallow recession with early recovery in 2001. However, he was pilloried in the press for the recession, for the mildness of the recovery, and for claiming credit for it.

The events of September 11 changed America, in that there were Congressional demands for an immediate and full investigation, which three weeks later exposed weaknesses in American security, for which Gore was held responsible. For the next three years, congressional opponents regularly condemned the administration for not doing enough to find Bin Laden, or complained about military adventurism when he did do something. In addition, a conservative congress and a compliant media revealed a slew of minor scandals within his administration, which tainted the office.

His approval rating hovering at a dismal 51% and gas prices approaching $2 a gallon, Gore in March of 2004 announced that he would not run for re-election. The Democratic party split between Vice President Lieberman (who had distanced himself from the president over policy while still calling himself the party's front runner) and John Kerry in a vicious battle that left the victorious Kerry weakened and easily finished off by Republican George W. Bush, who benefitted from a deep war chest, campaign director Karl Rove, and a deep-seated feeling that the GOP was robbed in 2000 and things would have been better under a Republican.

The new president has had to deal with new challenges. The sluggish delay of help arriving for victims of the Katrina Hurricane, nearly a day, has kicked off another round of Congressional hearings, which again held the Gore administration responsible. At the same time, Bush has brought to light the growing threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, and endorsed reports that Al Quaeda fled Afghanistan for Saddam Hussein's regime.

But then, call me a cynic, even in alternate worlds.

More later,

No Surprise

I amHastur! The Unspeakable One is the master of those who seek to unveil the mysteries of death. It is through meditation upon the Yellow Sign that the devotee of Hastur seeks transcendence to the city-realm of dim Carcosa. Through a complex series of visualizations that expand the aspirants void-consciousness, the final age will arise. Ruled by the ominous King in Yellow, a new stage of reality will come to fruition. Of the Olde Ones, Hastur is considered to be one of the most difficult to work with, his teachings being reserved exclusively for the Cthonian Adepts and Lords.

Which Great Old One are you?

More later, Ftaugn!

Shorter Presidential Speech

So we underfunded the Border Patrol, and now we're going to dispatch the National Guard to handle things, right?

Hmmmmm.

You know, I blew off mowing the lawn last weekend, and its going to be a little long by Saturday. Yathink you can have a few National Guardsmen swing by and run the mower for a few hours?

And the hedges. They need work, too.

More later,

Rant: Global Warning

So, you ask yourself - what can I do about Global Warming?

Well, you can stop calling it Global Warming. At least around me.

That's not to say I'm in denial about the fact that the planet is getting warmer. It is, and at a rate clear to anyone who is not getting their paychecks from the current adminstration or its cronies. However, it is part of a larger framework that is Climate Change, which deals with the fact that, as the supreme species on this planet, what we do has an effect on our environment.

Global Warming is one of those phrases that, like "Theory of Evolution" brings out the stupid in some people. They remember that heavy snow back in February or those cool days in May and use that fact as a refutation - since it is obviously not hot every day of the year, therefore this Global Warming thing must be a bust.

Well, sadly, no. While you can have a few cold days, on the average, its been getting hotter. Think of each day as a single game in a baseball season. You're going to have games where your team makes great plays and wins handily. And you're going to have games where they stink up the field. And if you are a supporter, you tend to remember the exceptional good games more than the really bad games. Its only over time that you realize that you team is losing more games than it is winning, and your team may not be very good. But by that time you're up to your ankles in seawater and realize you've been rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates (12 games out and its only May).

And indeed, with Climate Change, some places may actually get more rain or "better" climate. I'm not talking about Albertan rainforests or beachfront condos in Greenland. Of course the changed climate may prove to be pretty bad for the plants and creatures that are already used to the original format. And you can bet that corporations with the money to throw around are trying to refine the science on this, if for no other reason than to find the best place to put the new company HQ.

Now, the latest refuge for those in denial is the old/new concept of Global Dimming, which I seem to remember from some disaster book I read in the 70s (which ends with a glacier collapsing the west wing of the White House). In short, the idea is that more particulate pollution in the atmosphere causes more sunlight to bounce back into space. Less sunlight means it should get cooler. And in fact, in the days following 9/11, when no planes flew in the US except for those to get the Osama clan out of the country, the days were hotter than normal . Fewer jet contrails to block the sun. Global Dimming makes things cooler. Global Warming makes things warmer. Should balance out, right?

Wrong. What is ignored is that the NIGHTS following 9/11 were colder than normal as well. Folk who live in the normally cloud-covered territories of the Pacific Northwest know that a clear day usually means a cold night, because there are fewer clouds to trap the heat. So we have narrower swings of temperature as a result of Glboal Dimming. Further, as a result of these reduced temperature swings and cloudier days, we're messing with weather patterns elsewhere. It is a cyberpunk-chaos-butterfly. We kick out too many particulants from a wasteburning plant in Ohio, and the monsoon fails in Somalia.

So Global Dimming is a manmade modfication to the climate. And so is Global Warming. Both of these (and other things we're mucking about with) contribute to the entire prospect of Global Climate Change, which is the large-scale challenge that we and our descendents are going to have to address.

Everyone complains about the weather, said Twain, but no one does anything about it. Turns out we have been doing something about it for more than the past century - we just haven't been paying attention to what we've been up to. And now we're at the stage of seeing dramatic results in Climate Change.

In the meantime, Go Pirates!

More later,

Three-Dragon Ante

So my regular Thursday night gaming crew got together last night. Usually we play D&D 3.5, an Eberron campaign, but because of absences instead we decided on doing traditional games. And we wanted something relatively easy because our brains hurt, so we opened up Rob Heinsoo's new game, published by WotC - Three-Dragon Ante.

And it was real good. A straightforward game that links the D&D multicolored dragons with a playable card game. Each color of dragon is a suit, numbered 1-12. Each dragon has a special power, but that power only activates if its card number is equal to or lower than the previously played card. You ante in at the start of of a three round "gambit", and the player with the highest total in their "flight" of three cards at the end of the gambit wins the pot.

The interesting thing is that this mechanic pulls the player in two directions at the same time, creating a nice tension. You want to play high cards so you take the pot, but if you play high cards, you don't get to use your cards' powers, which range from taking money back from the pot to forcing other players to give you cards or chips. So you have to weigh the option of long-term versus short term gains. Plus the fact that you have a limited resource in your card hand, which does not replentish at the same rate as you lay down cards. As a result, you often have to buy additional cards (paying the pot), which makes the pot even larger.

Add to this special mortal cards, each card a special power, and unique cards like Bahumat and Tiamat, and you have a fast, involved, engaging game. Its a perfect "wait for the D&D game to start" kind of game, and stands alone as well. Check it out.

More later,

On The Road Again: Bumper Stinker

So I'm on the evening drive home, and I'm stuck behind a vehicle, color of baby puke, nicely washed, festooned with bumper stickers. The vehicle is a Kia or a Daewoo. The bumper stickers are right-wing jingo about gun ownership and flag-loving. I'll leave aside the amusing irony that, back in the 70s, this same mindset thought of owning a foreign car as being the equivalent of knocking boots with Khrushchev, but rather one of these gummy-stickered protests caught my eye.

"Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Rossi".

For those who have tuned in late - Dino Rossi was the loser in our gubernatorial elections, in a hotly-contested, razor-thin election that had to be settled in court. Christine Gregoire was the winner, and there were a lot of hard feelings from the losers on the matter.

At first I giggled, then I got irritated.

I giggled because, things have been pretty durn good for the past two years in Washington State. We've roared out of the dot-com bust, employment is up, housing is booming, our statehouse has more wonks than scoundrels, doing wonky things as opposed to scoundrelly things, there have been budget surplusses and honest-to-gosh plans for the future (The latest - what we're going to do about bird flu, making the assumption that we'll get no help from the National level). In comparison, I'm looking at the train wreck that is consuming the other Washington back east, where graft and corruption are rife, response and responsibility are missing, and the answer to every problem seems to be to give rich people more money.

But then I got irritated. The whole "Don't Blame Me" mentality is a cop-out, a disconnect, and a false understanding of one's civic responsibility. Government, particularly local government, is not something you're responsible for just on election day. It is a continual, ongoing process, a question of how the individual fits in with the greater whole. The false message of the "Don't Blame Me" crowd (Right or Left) is that once you lose on an issue, you are somehow absolved from everything that follows. Even if you are ignored or marginalized (like the hordes the Anti-War protesters that our mainstream media seems to continually miss seeing), you civic duty is to make your voice heard. The fact that you don't control the bus doesn't make it any easier for you when it drives off the cliff. On a national level, the next administration, GOP or Democrat, is going to have to spend the bulk of its time cleaning up the mess left by the current clowns in charge. And it doesn't matter who voted for what at the time.

So I won't blame Baby-Puke-Daewoo for voting for not voting for Gregoire. But I will blame her for promoting the idea that her civic responsibility ends with Election Day and a snarky bumper sticker.

More later,

Comics: Cosmic Reset Button

And when I’m thinking Deep Thoughts, I’m often thinking about comic book universes.

DC’s big universe-changing maxi-series, Infinity Crisis, has finally reached it conclusion with another cosmic reset button being mashed, but to talk about it, I need to back up a couple maxi-series, to the other Crises we seen.

Oh, right – Spoilers are all over the place here, and it’s a long one. And my geek flag will be flying throughout.

Let me start in with the nature of the various DC Crises in the first place. DC continuity from when I was growing up in the Silver Age was considered to occur on Earth-1. Earth-2, right next door, was where we had the golden age heroes and events (Superman fought Hitler, Batman carried a gun). At one point they had a Crisis on Earth-2 where the heroes from Earth-1 teamed up with those of Earth-2. Justice League meets Justice Society. Cool stuff. And they added over time Earth-3 (bad guys in charge), Earth-X (Hitler won WWII) and Earth-S (Captain Marvel Family). But eventually, the multiple earths got to be a bit much (and the fact Earth-1 was getting a bit long in the tooth – Superman met Kennedy?) and there was the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, which supposedly simplified the universes by merging them down to one.

Everything came down to one timeline. The only characters that remained unfolded into this "One Earth" were the Original 1938 Superman of Earth-2. the Lois Lane of Earth-2, the SON of the good Lex Luthor from Earth-3, and Superboy, who was not Earth-1 Superman as a boy OR Earth-2 Superman as a boy, but the only superhero from Earth-Prime, supposedly our non-super world. They got to go through an energy portal to a supposed paradise. Exit stage left.

So there was a big event and a restart. And there were a couple other restarts since then, like Zero Hour and Hypertime, over the years. Every so often, like a troublesome appliance, the DC Universe needs a good whack on the side. And there were lesser restarts that were ways of launching new lines and freshening up old characters.

So a few years back they did this with Identity Crisis, which I mentioned elsewhere in this blog. And while I didn’t care much for the ultimate story – The wife of a JLAer is brutally killed, and after some huggamugga the villain is revealed to be the suddenly-insane wife of ANOTHER JLAer, it did have an interesting tweak. When the initial victim is discovered, some of the JLA decide that the culprit had to be Doctor Light, who years before had attacked the victim. And they knew this because after the attack, these member of the JLA had mentally crippled Light, turning him from maniac into more of a joke villain. And while they were doing warping Doctor Light’s Brain, Batman came in, and they had to erase HIS memory as well.

Which brought up an interesting question that I don’t think was ever really dealt with in that series as it played out – where do you draw the line? In the old Silver Age stories, memory erasure was common (I think Supes once took out Lois Lane’s memory by using one eye with X-ray vision and the other with heat vision, a trick which ONLY COULD BE USED ONCE, which really amused me). So that wasn’t the problem, really. I mean, over in Flash’s comic, they worked a Doctor-Strange level spell that made everyone FORGET that Wally West was the Flash so he could have a fresh start. The memories of natives of the DC universe must look like swiss cheese at this point.

Mentally handicapping Doctor Light was a tougher call, but still could be argued as in the necessary category. Again, in recent times, the JLA had an entire race of baddies (The White Martians) who they hypnotized into believing they were humans and turning them loose on the world, supposedly cured of antisocial tendencies (No, it didn’t work).

But putting a mental hoodoo on Batman? That was apparently over the line, and laid some of the groundwork of what was to come, though I never really saw it laid out as such. That question of “What is necessary” sort of spilled over books as OTHER villains suddenly started getting their memories back, Bats got more secretive, and there was the question of the culpability of Superman, who could supposedly HEAR EVERYTHING. All this was left open.

So its not the crime – it’s the cover-up, and I was wondering how they could resolve it. In the process Wonder Woman killed a villain on who took over both Superman’s mind and the orbital Sentinels that Batman built out of his paranoia, the big three broke up, the JLA crashed, and a new threat appeared.

That threat was shown in the recently-finished Infinity Crisis. Remember Supes-2, Young Luthor, Superboy-Prime, and Lois? Well, they came back. Lois got ill, Luthor put out the idea in that it was the fact that the wrong earth was saved, and Superboy and Superman punched their was back into the DC continuity to clean things up.

And again, this series has an interesting initial question – how did the post-crisis universe stand up to the previous incarnations? It was a tougher, darker universe – how much of that was the fault of the heroes? How do we demonstrate that they have done well?

And the result was a mess, with very little of the tight focus that we had in the earlier Identity Crisis. The main book was made up of a lot of action shots which would then lead into supporting books. The whole Amazon supporting cast for Wonder Woman was dumped, the Speed Force that powered the Flash (a post-Crisis evolution) was shelved, along with Wally West flash. No real clue about what happened to Atom and Aquaman, though they have “new” editions of them coming along. Hawkman is missing (don’t know why).

Young Luthor, a hero in the first Crisis, was a bad guy because Luthors are always bad guys. Superboy-Prime turned out to be a true ass, and tore through a huge swath of minor characters, including the current Superboy (who still isn’t Superman as a boy, but rather a clone made up of Superman AND Luthor’s DNA). Original Lois dies anyway. The Infinite Earths reappear, briefly. Superman-1 and Superman-2 defeat Superboy-Prime, though Superman-1 gets depowered (for the moment) and Superman-2 dies (which is kinda sad – I liked the idea of the concept of Original Supes being out there “somewhere”).

And the world is remade with a bunch of little tweaks to the history (Wonder Woman now helped found the JLA, Bats has some resolution to his origin story, the Smallville TV show is part of the Superman history), and things go on.

And Superboy-Prime is locked up in a double-talk prison surrounded by Green Lanterns, so he can pop out whenever they need another murderous Superbeing.

And here’s the thing – the whole question of a hero’s right to deal with the villain was a big subtext of Identity Crisis, but remains pretty much unanswered. The Insane Evil Superboy Prime is a great candidate for capital punishment, or at least a mind-wipe, which was the big question in Identity Crisis. You mindwipe him, toss him in the Phantom Zone, and 1000 years later, he’s Mon-El from the Legion of Superheroes.

The OTHER big bad (Young Luthor) gets a more traditional comic book exit – Batman gets the chance to shoot him, decides not to do it (thereby redeeming Batman as less-bloodthirsty), a falling building allows Luthor to get away, and Luthor gets shot by Joker instead. (Thank goodness we have villains to do the karmic clean up after the good guys).

Yet Infinite Crisis, despite the sturm und drang, does not answer the initial questions raised by either the Infinite Crisis OR the Identity Crisis. At what point is ultimate action justified (Identity)? Have the heroes of the Post-Crisis of Infinite Earths been good stewards of the universe that they were left (Infinite)?

But I guess those questions have to either be ultimately ignored, or will wait for the NEXT Crisis.

More later,

Going Away Party

Also this weekend, we had a going away party for Tammy and Charles, who are moving to England. Stan of the Stannex came up from San Diego and NikChik took photos, including this one.

Quite good looking, I must say.

More later,

Blatant Plug

So I've spent most of yesterday and today thinking deep thoughts. Like - Can the New Testament truly be thought of as fanfic for the Old Testament, and does that make Jesus a Mary Sue figure? I've also been drinking rum punches. Real good rum punches.

But otherwise, I should note that I, Monkey King, and Dthon will be speaking at the upcoming Writer's Weekend in June, doing panels on worldbuilding and shared worlds. Just in case you're interested.

More later,

Documentary

Office Space: starring Ron Livingstone and Jennifer Aniston, written and directed by Mike Judge.

So what makes a classic movie? I think part of it is catchy, repeatable lines, but a big part of it is continual and repeated exposure. Wizard of Oz wasn't big when it released, but became beloved by America by a relentless Thanksgiving Day pummelling. When I was a lad, It's a Wonderful Life was just another Jimmy Stewart movie, but when it suddenly (and briefly) became public domain, it popped up everywhere, and entered our stream of consciousness. Star Wars and The Godfather have the advantage that people were willing to pay for multiple exposures (at least for the early ones in the series). As a result, the lines from these movies became part of our discussion.

And so we have Office Space, which has reached that status where I knew all the bits (TPS reports, red swingline stapler, no, I can't say I missed it at all) without ever having to physically watch the movie. I mentioned it to a co-worker, who was kind enough to lend me a copy. And the Lovely Bride and I hunkered down to watch it last night.

And it was OK. Not bad. A mildly rebellious comedy in the same was that a Dilbert coffee cup is mildly rebellious. Work sucks. Your boss is an oaf. Your co-workers are morons. The other lane always moves faster. Most of the characters put my teeth mildly on edge, except for the old codger worried about his job. Him, for some reason, I liked. I've lived through these types of jobs before, mostly in my previous incarnation of as an engineer - the life of a corporate creative is a lot wierder, and usually more fun.

In a nutshell - Peter (Ron Livingston) hates his job, is hypnotized to relax, as a result has a breakthrough that he doesn't really need to care about his job, gets promoted, defrauds his company, experiences remorse, seeks to come clean, but is saved by a nebbishy co-worker (Steven Root, the heart of the movie) finally going postal. The movie is a collection of encounters more than an overarching narative flow. And that's OK - it has a handmade feeling that it was not spit out by a script-processing program. There are a few plot holes and a lot of missed opportunities that would have been picked up in a revision that sought to wrap everything up neatly. And the general moral is - you are victimized in your job only so long as you choose to be victimized.

Uplifting message. Not horribly threatening. Nothing as active or progressive as, say, 9 to 5. Has the deeper meaning of Ziggy cartoon on a cubicle wall. If you're seeing yourself in such an environment, its time to go hunting for another job. One with more flare.

More later,

No Quarter: And The Winner Is:

Fishzilla.

Meh. Its a pretty innocuous design, nothing that really stands out or, by the same token, brings great sadness upon our land. And it is a definite improvement over the dog's breakfast that was the jumble of images with the state outline.

Of course, this is only the poll, and the final result lay with our elected officials. so I expect the apple lobby to be busy for the next few weeks.

More later,

The Weekend

So over brunch, the Monkey King and I were talking about his Friends List - he had made some shakeups recently - adding some people, removing others. He pulled a couple because they were TOO much bogged down in their daily life ("I had a sandwich just now. It was a good sandwich"). And he mentioned in passing that I don't talk ENOUGH about my everyday life.

And he's right. I guess I think my day to day, even my weekends, are kind of boring. Everyday life stuff.

But how could I miss out on plugging my company's big project - Guild Wars: Factions? The new game has just rolled out this past week, and even as I write the servers are giving off a cheery, warm, red glow from use. Part of the lack of mention probably has been due to the wave of exhaustion that set in immediately after going live, and another part the fact that everyone was "playtesting" the live build at the end of the week (That's our story and we're sticking to it).

But that's business - how was your weekend, Jeff?

Not bad. Kate and I got together with our semi-regular poker group Friday night, and though no poker was played this time, a good time was had by all. And Saturday morning was the aforementioned brunch at Salty's with the Monkey King, Shelly in Seattle, young Heidi Katarina, the Monkey King's sister visiting from Chicago, our resident Tolkien scholar, his social security administration spouse, and the Lovely Bride. A veritable Algonquin roundtable of discussion.

And then I came home and had a long nap. It was a good nap. It was a necessary nap, as I was still worn out from the week. When I got up, I ended up watching the Mikado on a local college channel. It was a 2001 version by the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society, with Dave Ross as tailor-turned-executioner Ko-Ko. Yeah, and it looked like radio host and house candidate Dave Ross as well. Came as a complete surprise, and made Kate's gaming group wonder what the heck I was up in the basement.

Sunday the Lovely Bride and I went clamming. A long, beautiful drive around the sound to Duckabush, which sounds like a Marx Brothers routine but is really a long, wide beach on the far side of the Hood canal. Its relatively remoteness makes it a good clamming beach, and Kate and I spent a couple hours digging up butters, manilas, and littlenecks. Which were then served with garlic and wine over a bed of pasta.

And that's about it. You know, a typical boring weekend. How was yours?

More later,

Fanfic

There has been an uptick in notices about Fanfic (Fan Fiction) of late, particularly involving an aspiring author who tried to offer her Star Wars fan fiction for sale on Amazon.com (The lawyers stepped in and hilarity commenced). I've always thought of fanfic as a child of a lesser god, at best warm-up excercises for real writing. But Theresa Nielsen Hayden really nails the nature of fan fiction on the head here.

I think the operative line is this: "Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights". And she's right. The borders of the fan fiction enclosure are determined by who owns the property and whether it is still enforced. It used to be the Fanfic was easily identified by mimeo paper and typoes. Now with the Internet and print-on-demand, those easy tell-tales are missing, and the phrase, while it retains a legal meaning, has no literary meaning.

Depending on where you set down those borders, I have either written no fan fiction in my life, or written almost exclusively fan fiction. The work on Starcraft and Warcraft books were licenses, but while I expanded those worlds, I did not generate the original properties. The FR, DL, and Magic: The Gathering books I've written have been in worlds/Intellectual Properties I've helped develop, but there are many original hands involved in the mix. And most recently, I've written a short story for The Further Adventures of Beowulf (coming this fall), which could be considered fanfic except for the fact it has a major publisher and the Geats don't have a legal staff anymore.

Once sensitized, I started going through my bookshelf for other examples: Shadows Over Baker Street, which merged the Cthulhu and Holmes mythoi, is only done well because the writers engage with both universes. Pride and Prescience, a charming book by Carrie Bebris, takes Jane Austin's Elizabeth and Lord Darcy and turns them into detectives. The Mad Merlin books by J. Robert King build heavily on not only the Authurian mythos, but other concurrent legends and works as well. All build directly on predecessors, using characters created by others.

Fan fiction, in the broadest sense, all. Because you have to be a fan in order to put up with all the pain involved with writing.

More later,

Torus, Torus, Torus!

"You have tori," said my dentist, "That's plural for torus"

And actually it wasn't my regular dentist, who was on vacation, but his associate, but she was wearing the nice white coat so I believed her.

Actually, I always called these things "two bumps in my mouth", on the upper jaw, on each side of my face, right above the teeth. I've been aware of them for years, primarily because the occasional wad of food was stuck up there, but when I thought of them, I thought they were natural, or at worst the result of getting old.

According to the dentist, they are bony growths in the mouth, often the result of braces or grinding teeth. I did have the former, along with a procedure that removed four of my teeth so my wisdoms could come in. I don't do the latter, but I do bite down on pens when I'm working - often shattering them. Sort of a "bite the bullet" thing when I'm engaged in literary surgery.

Tori are pretty harmless growths of bone, but they do explain something I've wondered about. Because they are there, they do tend to shove the sides of my mouth up a little, giving me apple cheeks and leaves me with an apparent smile when I'm not otherwise engaged.

So, it turns out there is a reason for that dumb grin on my face.

More later,

Comics: Golden Age

So a lot of the comics blogs I've been haunting have been talking about "first comics" - the comic books you read as a kid that convinced you that comic books were worth reading, and leading to comics collecting and in many cases writing and drawing and editing comics. In my case, I don't think it is "first comics" that are important, but rather where one's personal "golden age" of comics is located.

No, I'm not going all nostalgic on you - well, OK, just a little. All this has an eventual point, so bear with me.

I read comics as a kid, and the more I think about it, the more comics I remember I've read. Sad Sack and Lil' Hot Stuff from Harvey, Sugar and Spike, Jimmy Olsen, Dial H for Hero, the occasional Flash (Carmine Infantino chins that could be used to open cans!) from DC, a big pile of Classics Illustrated, and even some Charlton heroes. Not much Marvel because Marvel was always in the middle of some storylines, and my buying habits (summers, vacations, etc . . .) never guarenteed I could catch the next issue. But I did read some of Marvel monster books (Where Creatures Dwell and that ilk) and their war books (both Sargent Fury and Captain Sawyer).

Anyway, I read comics, then like most people in the universe, I stopped. Moved on - one relic of those days was continuing to read MAD magazine and the bajillion paperbacks they were putting out in those days, and the paperback collections of Peanuts. So fade out on comic books until my sophmore year of college.

Two things contributed to my return to comics - Star Wars and a guy named Joe Karpierz (Hey, Joe!). First off, Star Wars had come out and hit big with me and my gang, even though we had cinderella licenses and the only place it played in Pittsburgh was in Monroeville (the last time we passed the site, the theater was shut down and abandoned, but that's another rant). In the wake of the movie, we wanted to know more, and Marvel was there with really bad comic books (Ask a die-hard Star Warrior about the giant green carnivorous bunny that teamed with Han Solo and watch him recoil in horror). So I picked up these books while I was in college, read them, and then mailed them to the Lovely Bride (back when she was still the Lovely Girlfriend). And I picked up a Howard the Duck or three, as well, but had not been drawn over to the long-underwear heroes yet.

Now Joe was next door, and he did read comics - those long-running, multi-part Marvels - FF, Iron Man, Thor. And of course I started reading them as well. And during the summer break, I would pick up the ones that were missing, since Joe was not around to lean on. And suddenly I got hooked into comics again. This was a time when Claremont and Byrne were getting their start on X-Men (and there was only one X-Man book, published every two months), when Micheline and Layton were on Iron Man, when Two-in-One (with the Thing) and Team-Up (with Spiderman) were the continuity books, and Mark Gruenwald was doing Captain America. The Beast was part of the Avengers, and was not only smart and agile, but happy about it.

And this, not Sugar and Spike, was my personal golden age. This time I was firmly ensconsed in the Marvel Universe, though the Teen Titans and Legion of Superheroes (team books) brought me back to DC. It was the start of the direct-sale comic market, and with it both imports (Titan collections of Judge Dredd, translations of Asterix and Obelix) and independents (Elfquest, Love and Rockets, Cerebus before Sim went insane). For me this was a time when comics were new, and things were better, before Mutant Angst and a million different spinoffs and Punisher showing up everywhere and yeah, this is turning into an old-guy rant, so I'll stop.

The comics I liked during that golden age would become the type of comics I would then write when I got a chance. Team books where the participants bounced off each other, but pretty much liked each other. Forgotten Realms is the example. There is a good feeling around these books that dates back to Shooter-era Marvels and early X-men. The heroes were pretty happy about their lives, even if they were feared by a humanity they were sworn to protect. If heroes failed, it was so they could rise again. Those were the stories of "when the world was new" for me, and is reflected in the kind of stories I wanted to tell.

This comes to me when I see things within the current comic book universes, a history where changes are made and then reversed. The decision-makers (writers, artists, and most of all editors) reflect their own personal golden ages in their choices.

Let me give you an example based on the editorial zig-zags that have plagued one silver-age hero - Green Lantern

You'd think I'd be a big fan of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, the GL from when I was a kid (and I suppose should be written Hal (Green Lantern) Jordan). But in my memory, that Green Lantern was pretty much interchangeable with Hawkman, Flash, and Green Arrow. They all had their own schtick as far as powers were concerned, but they were pretty whitebread - just another supersuit. (I left before the classic Neil Adams GL/GA stories, so don't bust my chops). It is only retcon (Retroactive Continuity) that gives these guys their own personalities (I think that's a rant for another day as well). So I found the Hal Jordan of my later "Golden Age" a little stuffy, his John Stewart replacement more intereresting, and despite my age bracket, I liked Kyle Rayner the best (known to one of my comic-book friends as "crab-face-boy" for his mask). I really wasn't too bothered when Hal Jordan turned to the dark side, became a villain, and was replaced.

But some (well, many) were - those who had Hal Jordan stories as part of their personal golden age. And when those individuals rose to the age where they were writing and making decisions, Hal started his comback - first sacrificing himself to save the universe, then coming back as the mystic hero Spectre (another candidate for this Golden Age analysis) and finally becoming Green Lantern again, nudging aside Kyle and bringing us back to the 60s.

Here is another possible Personal Golden age - the current All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison. Great stuff, and highly recommended, but I see the "goofy Silver Age" of my youth peaking through his stories. When Superman cranked out a new super-power every other issue, when a tour of his Fortress of Solitude was cool, and when Atlas charming Lois Lane was considered a threat. It is all done lovingly, and despite being billed as a new approach, it is really a very old approach, and, I think, is another personal Golden Age at work.

So here's my point: There is a conservative nature within comics in that everyone is influenced by the personal golden ages of their youth. It is not the only influence, and does not mean that comics are continually damned to repeat themselves as the Kyle Rayner fans grow up and turn into the next generation of writers, artists, and editors, but there it will be that influence. Were I to start writing comics again (holds imaginary phone to ear and mouthing the words "call me"), I don't doubt that the soft-touch, personality driven, full-color world of early Claremont and Byrne, Layton and Micheline, and continuity-gathering Mark Gruenwald would influence the stories I tell.

Oh, and my version of the Beast? Definitely Blue and Bouncing.

More later,

Play: Good Cry

Tuesdays with Morrie by Jeffrey Hatcher & Mitch Albom, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Directed by David Esbjornson, April 8 - May 7, 2006.

So the curtains fall on the Seattle Rep's season with a weeper, a soft, sentimental, feel-good piece based on a nationally-known best-seller. The theatrical equivalent of a chick-flick, all about emotions and lessons learned.

And, blast it all, if I wasn't crying at the end, and rising with the rest of the house in a standing ovation.

OK, so I am not made of stone. Now you know.

Here's the short version - the play is based on the book Mitch Ablom wrote about his former mentor, Morrie Schwartz. Morrie was Mitch's favorite professor in college. Mitch grew up, grew away, lost touch, made the big time as a sports journalist. Morrie get ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and starts dying. Mitch gets back in touch, and through regular Tuesday get-togethers, learns to be less of a schmuck.

And Mitch, in the play, is a schmuck. Played by Lorenzo Pisoni, he's that 90's kind of success story, someone superficially successful through sheer activity but inwardly hollow. The good news is that the play gets into the whys and wherefores of his nature as it gets towards how he learns to be a better person. Though to be honest, a zen sensei would be breaking his zen sensei staff over his zen sensei knees over the length of Mitch's path to enlightenment.

And Morrie is that sensei, his death sentence from the disease pushing himself to reach out even more. Played by Alvin Epstein, Morrie is a character, and within moments of him arriving on the stage, you know this, and you're rooting for him. He's that lovable uncle, that kind mentor figure, that cool old guy that we all want to be someday. Epstein also doesn't stint on the debilitating nature of the disease, and that gives his common-sense wisdom and good nature the gravitas it needs to be less than mere sentimentality.

I don't think I've had a mentor of that type - non-blood relation, serious age difference. My main industry is relatively new, such that we were building our own tools as we went forward. Most of my generation of game designers were in the same age group, and are more of a band of brothers (and sisters) than mentor/students. But the Lovely Bride has this kind of relationship, a former English teacher, and early in the relationship (when we were in college), she was kind enough to share her. On the first meeting, she wanted to know about this new "Cyberpunk" sf. It's been good talking to her ever since (though it has been too long - she's taken to retiring to Florida for the winter when we're back in town for Thanksgiving).

So back to the play. Yep, it's sentimental. Yep, it plays on the heart strings. Yep, it has that self-improvement, feel-good nature that you connect with an afterschool special. But it works, and works well. And it was the first full-house standing ovation I've seen this season.

More later,

Local Politics - First Pitch of the Season

Gracious, we're seven months out and I’m already behind the curve.

Yeah, that sounds weird, but the movers and shakers and shakey movers and movey shakers have all been working behind the scenes, so that by the time you’re asked to make any decisions as a voter, a lot of the decisions have already been made. Here's where we stand, seven months out.

US Senator - this is the marquee event, and has already turned strange. The incumbent is Maria Cantwell, who has served out her freshman term as a bit of policy wonk - doing her job well, but not making enough waves to really call attention to herself. In political terms, that makes her supposedly vulnerable. The GOP cleared the field in favor of executive Mike McGavick, who resigned from his gig at Safeco with a large "have fun storming the castle" departure package, and should have been able to close the gap, in the GOP tradition of laying low about one's own backing and intentions while combing over your opponent's record. (His initial pitch was to make Washington more polite, I suppose by removing ALL non-Republicans)

And then the odd thing happened. The Senator of Alaska, Ted Stevens, whose porcine-cylindrical-container habits exceed those of Mr. Byrd of West Virginia, got into a spitting match with Ms. Cantwell over, among other things, drilling in Alaska. And Big Ted lost, in the process showing Maria to be of sterner stuff than it had previously seemed. So Ted is now a big booster of Mr. McGavick, going so far as to campaign and fundraise for him. Because, you know, Alaska doesn’t get enough porkbarrel already - it really needs a third senator to handle all the boodle.

So as a result of this, McGavick looks like an Alaskan handpuppet, but Cantwell is far from healthy, in part because of her support of the war. Or rather, not being sufficiently AGAINST the war, which has peeved off our extreme liberal wing just at the same time Mike is cleaving mightily to his party's conservative wing. So the left is edgy about her, even though she has come through time and again on other progressive issues. Now add into the mix a protest candidate from the Greens (who desite their name, don't seem to care as much about the environment as they once did), and you have a potential mess.

Stay tuned. This has nowhere to go but down.

House of Representatives -– The Undercard is just as interesting in the 8th district, my home town. Here the freshman is Dave Reichert, and the challenger a grass-roots progressive named Darcy Burner who got in early and swept most of the establishment Dems aside. Mind you, her early work was at a time when no one even thought the Eighth was going to competitive. The Stranger, of all people, does a nice writeup on her here for those locals who want to know who’s going after the new sherrif.

And for his part, Reichert has been like Cantwell - the new kid, though he's been much better at getting out the press releases when he's done good. And I think he has fulfilled the First Commandment”that every voter asks of an elected official: For Gods Sake, Don't Embarrass Us. Yet his nice-guy demeanor and strong homeland security approach is hampered by the fact that he is in a party that thinks government consists of shoving huge amounts of cash down your pants. He's the rookie cop who is asked to wait outside while his veteran partners shake down the bookie for their weekly taste. It's gotta hurt.

You've met people in Reichert's position before –- he's the nice guy with the psycho fiance. You're sitting in the bar with him, and he's telling you about how good the relationship is and how they both respect each other's space. Then his cell phone rings, and he says "hello", and you can hear the screaming on the other end from four feet way. And he says "uh-huh" and you hear more screaming. And he says "OK" and folds up the phone, lets out a deep sigh, and says "Well, I gotta go. She needs me to go approve drilling in Alaska".

Our much-disliked, trigger-happy Veep came out to campaign for candidates in Washington State (thanks to the rest of the nation for footing the bill for his trip, but, sadly, we're sending him back). That put Reichert in the nasty position of either cheesing off the GOP stalwarts by snubbing the shindig, or cheesing off the rest of the population by supporting an incredibly unpopular party leader. He showed up (good for him), but I haven't seen any photos of the two together yet.

State Supreme Court - This is usually pretty quiet, but we already we have a jump on this one. The same conservative business interests that installed Jim Johnson are now putting up my former state senator Stephen Johnson for Supreme Court, based on the triple whammy of a) he's not scary looking, b) he does what he's told, and c) his last name is Johnson. How can they lose?

State Senator - but with Johnson running for supreme, we have a hole in the 47th district. And finally we get to the stage where the candidates are not selected in advance. Dave Reichert's younger brother was considering the run, but bowed out (pity - if he's the one I spoke with on the phone, he seems like a nice guy). So the rumors are afoot that my State Representitive Geoff Simpson (who has been excellent in his job) may take on the position. Which, I suppose, means we have to find a new State Rep, but more on that as it plays out.

And THEN we have the clown car which are state initiatives. These are still in the sig-gathering stage, but I see on the list here, there is a Tim Eyeman-sponsored initiative to keep car tabs at 30 bucks, an Tim Eyeman-sponsored initiative to open carpool lanes, and a couple other Tim Eyeman-sponsored initiatives geared to make state government more like Tim Eyeman. More on these as they develop as well.

And finally, on the national level, the President of China was in town today, meeting with the most important man in America, our Chief Executive. After leaving Microsoft, he'll meet with President Bush.

More later,

State of the Blog

So what is the state of the blog? Well, I've been meaning to write this since January, so that's a hint.

It is not that there has not been content on this site for the past few months, it is just that more stuff has been lining up behind it. Things I have meant to note, reviews I have intended to make, subjects I have intended to broach once I had things sorted out in my own mind. As a result, there are a number of outtakes, half-entries, and other musings that never make it into digital print.

And blogging, much like newspapers, is time sensitive.

Here's an example. On my "finished" pile is a copy of John Scalzi's Old Man's War, which is an good book and an excellent first novel and I wanted to tell you so. Unfortunately, the I've taken so long to tell you that it's been nominated for a Hugo this year. Ditto for the work of another author I've wanted to tell you about, Charles Stross, who is also very good and is ALSO a Hugo nominee. Both gave me a chance to get in on a loud and public fan early on, but now they've gone on an succeeded without me.

In politics, I have a similar case of Jeffrey-come-lately with Darcy Burner, the Democrat challenger for Dave Reichert's seat in the 8th district. Five months ago I got a fundraising note from her that made me smile - Reichert is one of the few members of this GOP congress who is not up to his armpits in scandal, so I thought him an easy re-election. Now there is suddenly national attention to this ground-level campaign and the elephants are deeply concerned. It turns out that Ms. Burner has put together an effective grass-roots campaign, convinced the establishment Dems to let her take her chance, and mobilized an effective team of supportness bloggers and net-root activitists. So there is another chance to get in on the ground floor and report from the trenches.

And here's the opening line of another entry, half-written - "The recent protests in the Middle East are as much about cartoons as the Sepoy mutiny was about bacon-flavored bullet cartridges". But I think that ground has been stomped and re-stomped so many times that it is getting a bit thin.

I think part of the backlog has been the fact I want to get things right, or at least create the illusion of getting things right. There are always going to be information that trickles out later, or hunches that prove to be false, but I'd like to as right as possible for the then-situation. And there are also things that I want to track down (in the case of the Scalzi review, it is a simple matter of confirming a memory I had about Heinlein - I just haven't gotten around to it). And part of it is that if I start talking about it, be is Katrina or state quarters, I feel a need to keep people informed. So the longer I go, the more of a train of earlier work I bring with me.

I am also very aware that the nature of blogging seems to have changed as well in the past couple years. It has gone from a bunch of folk talking about their lives to a semi-effective media tool. That means some people want to regulate it more, while others want to harness it. Look for more attempts to clamp down on blogging over the next year, as well as more major-league political and corporate entities to move into the fray, adding bloggers to the tool box of getting their message across.

This arrival of major players on the field is nothing new. Back in the day where people bought sheet-music as opposed to records or Itunes, the methods of promoting were the local taverns and theaters. And if your publishing house wanted to get attention for your songs, you'd hire a boomer - someone who would go into the bars and request the company's tunes, or go to the theater and enthusiastically lead the applause. I expect to see a lot more boomers on the net than there are already, so always be aware of who is doing the writing.

Similarly, the blogosphere is fragile. It is NOT as if everyone has a printing press in their house. Rather, it is as if everyone has ACCESS to a printing press, which is kept somewhere else, and could be hauled away in the dead of night. The difference is telling. Something can happen, when political or legal (or both), and all this can evaporate like a summer mist off the lake. You show up one day and its gone, replaced with something that is more controlled (and boring) or more corporately focused (and suspect). And it doesn't even have to be corporately controlled - a few hedgehog-shaped lawsuits, all bristles and litigation, can send out the chilling effect to shut down all but the most dedicated of opponents on a subject.

So for the time being, enjoy what goes on here - Quarters, Katrina, Local Politics, Play Reviews and all. This blog is going to remain about my life (mostly) and what I think (get used to it). After careful consideration, I am still choosing not to enable comments - the rising tide of comment spam makes me think it is the right choice, but more importantly, I'm treating this as a broadcast medium. If you want to send a letter to the editor, the email address it there in the righthand corner. I am also not putting any trackers on this site, yet, since it still feels a little too calculating. Quite simply, I would start slanting my coverage to my market, and that way lies madness. I think I want to stay an amateur in this - I have been swallowed by too many of my hobbies over the years, and I already have a job (a couple of jobs), and I want to keep this one enjoyable.

More later,

No Quarter: Voting Restored

So the voting has been re-enabled here for the Washington State Quarter. As noted previously, the earlier vote was freeped in the manner that often accompanies such polls. In this case, the damage was caught and they did something about it, which is appreciated.

The state government also did two other things of note to change the page. First, they no longer are presenting the up-to-the-minute numbers of the votes, so there is no way of knowing how your choice is doing. This may result less of a temptation to skew the poll (if your fave is losing), but also sort of defeats the "horse race" nature of such polls.

Secondly, and more importantly, they now have a disclaimer stating that the poll will only be "a part of the process". How big a part is kind of nebulous, and will probably have influence only if it agrees with the people in the room making the decision at the end of the day. So if the apple lobbyists are there, we may be looking at a very, very ugly coin.

More later,

On The Road Again: Fast Lane

So, from my morning commute, I can only assume that we won the war. I mean, is there any reason for the fact I don't see any of those magnetic yellow ribbons anymore?

OK, OK, I'm not here to talk about that, but rather about another interesting phenomenon.

Since taking the new gig my driving habits have changed radically. Last time I had to make the Bellevue commute, I would be up before dawn and take surface streets as much as I could to avoid I-405, the main artery north. Now that I arrive at a more . . . leisurely hour, I tend to just take 405 North. And its pretty smooth - a couple slowdowns, some dead stops, but easier than navigating through the stoplights of downtown Renton.

Now the thing that I've noticed that's interesting is this: the right lane moves faster. It seems counter-intuitive - the right lane should be the slowest lane, but from non-scientific analysis, it gets you there faster.

And by non-scientific analysis, I mean the following: I get on 405 and pick a distinctive vehicle in the middle lane (the far left lane is HOV). A strange color car, a pickup hauling stuff, a particular truck. Then you hang in the right lane pace it, and see which one reaches the I-90 intersection first.

And lo and behold, more often than not its the right lane that moves faster. With the trucks, and continual merging from the entrance ramps. As a former civil engineer, it feels wrong, but so far the commute has been a breeze.

Now, there is one exception to the above rule - when someone suddenly switches from the middle lane to the right lane (usually right in front of you, because your lane is moving and theirs is not), THEN the right lane will suddenly stop completely. Because thats just the way Car Karma works.

More later,

No Quarter: Hack the Vote

Yah know, when something seems too good to be true, it usually is:

Case in point, the selection of the state quarter voting. When I first recommended it, it was at about 500,000 votes, which surprised but did not alarm me. Oddly enough, the quarter I favored (the Native American Orca) was significantly ahead.

Now, I am many things, but a finger on the pulse of the popular mood is not one of them. I thought most of the voting public would jump for the middle design (Fishzilla), which is nice but not as risky. Surprised but with no sense of unease, I turned to other matters.

Then I checked in today - even more votes, and the Orca was ahead by even more. At this point my shennanigans-detector was fully alerted, and I mentioned that something seemed wrong with the voting to my fellow inebriants at the Alliterates.

Well, it turns out someone hacked the vote. The story is here, again one of those stories brought forward by local bloggers. Now, I LIKE the orca, but even I'm not going to buy that it was such a hands-down favorite. Kudos to those who brought it out to light of day, and I hope the state gov fixes the problem and then makes sure we aren't using the same software in the next election, mmmmkay?

More later,

Performance: L. Ron Half-Elven

Great Men of Genius: created and performed by Mike Daisey, directed by Jean-Michele Gregory, Capitol Hill Arts Center, April 6, 7, 8 and 9.

OK, you know the drill by now. Yadda yada yada Mike Daisey, yada yada Four nights, four geniuses, yada yada Lovely Bride and I got tickets.

And now we have the wrap-up - L. Ron Hubbard.

So this one was packed – I mean line-down-the-block, seats-put-everywhere, hope-the-fire-marshal-doesn't-show-up packed. And it was warm from body heat and stage lights.

And there was something else as well – a feeling of potential danger. While all the others of the series had their devotees, Mr. Hubbard has followers, as befits one who has created his own religion. Fanatical followers. Fanatical followers with sharp teeth and lawyers.

So there was very much a feeling of a Sword of Damocles hanging over Daisey's table, as if he had volunteered to disassemble a live explosive while we watched. OR was doing a show about that whacky Martin Luther in Lake Woebegone. Or he's telling a story about his Mother and you know his Mom is sitting right next to you.

And indeed Daisey pulls it off, mostly. I picked up a lot about L. Ron Hubbard's life, primarily because I've never paid attention to him previously. He was always this old-time SF Writer who I don't remember ever reading, a minor leaguer compared to Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke, who hit it big with Carlin's Law: "If you stick two things together that have never been stuck together before, some schmuck will buy it". In this case the two things were SF and Organized Religion. And I guess I always thought less of Hubbard because he sort of cut out on geekdom.

Daisey takes an interesting road, of how we create our realities and reassurances, and in turn compares Scientology with autohypnosis, acting exercises, the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe (who gets pummeled much worse about the head and shoulders than Scientology), psychoanalysis, Microsoft "special retreats" and the reward system in most computer games (and, yahknow, it is only that last one that makes me mildly uncomfortable). He probably could have thrown in the Masons and other fraternal orgs like the Elks, Eagles, and Oddfellows as well. And while on one hand his comparisons are all over the board, they are also much more comforting, making L. Rod's belief organization not seem so alien after all.

End result? Worth three nights – really worth all four, if you can make it. The show goes to New York, and for those readers of this journal out there, is worth checking out.

Performance: A Feast of St. Nikola

Great Men of Genius created and performed by Mike Daisey, directed by Jean-Michele Gregory, Capitol Hill Arts Center, April 6, 7, 8 and 9.

OK, so if you skip down a couple entries in this journal, you get the background on how we ended up at CHAC for Mike Daisey's Great Men of Genius series - four nights, each night on a different man. We caught Brecht on Thursday, missed Barnum on Friday, and Saturday night was Nikola Tesla's turn.

Tesla was a patron saint of mad scientists, which is odd since so much of his work is actually incredibly vital for what we call the modern world. AC current, electromagnetic motors, X-Rays - all Tesla coolness. Yet this crucial figure has been marginized over the decades, probably because of things like his (possibly successful) earthquake machine and his (possibly unsuccessful) death ray. Yet even among the mads, Tesla is more exciting in theory than in reality - he was mild-mannered, quirky guy, likely with OCD, someone you would not want to hang around. He was brilliant, but sounds more dynamic in vague memory than in the man he was. In this he reminds me of Lovecraft, another creator that he both predates and postdates.

Daisey bounces through Tesla life, in particularly his relationships with men we DO remember, Edison and Westinghouse. Telsa may have been the last great creator/inventors, who produced wonders out of the air, carving in images in his mind that only he could see. Edison was a technologist, who invented a better way to invent, and in that way shared a history with Eli Whitney, who made a better way to make things. Edison was process, Tesla was genius. Westinghouse, a patron saint within my home town (Pittsburgh), comes out as a tool of Tesla's vengeance against Edison - the method by which he proves them all wrong in classic Mad Science style.

Daisey weaves Tesla's life through his own, in particular his youth, when he was a Big Science Geek. His romance with science was both longer and deeper than my own, and more passionate, spurred by early-80s fears of mass apocalypse. I can see his point, in that I went through my own "big science" phase as well as "end of the world" phase, though mine was fueled more by Late Great Planet Earth than by Red Dawn. And how in the end he turned away from Big Science (indeed, towards the Brechtian Era covered in the first performance), and brought it full circle to Tesla's Death Ray.

Daisey feels on firmer ground here - while his Brecht monologue was strong, his Tesla work feels more rooted (he has visited the subject before, and I think there is enough Teslania out there for a couple more monologues). And in dredging up those old memories, he reminded me of my own Big Science Romance, tucked like a bookmark in the back of Scientific America. And yeah, while I too have fallen to wayside in my scientific geekery, there is still a spark of the Tesla Coil within me, looking for ground.

And yes, the Lovely Bride moved around her schedule so we can do Hubbard on Sunday night. I'm interested in how this all falls together. In the mean time, I want to really check out the dates of Tesla's death ray demonstration at the Tungusta Explosion in Siberia.

More later,

PS - Hi to Chris and Nikchik from across the crowded room!

PPS - Written at 3 AM local time when awakened with a sour stomach, corrected ten hours later when I discovered a major piece of dislexia in the writeup.

No Quarter (Special SayWA Edition)

So Washington State has opened up the voting for the new Washington State Quarter here. Since I've gone to such great lengths to go after the other quarters, it is only fitting to take on this group as well.


Well, this is the typical mixmaster disaster that we've seen so often before - a glumping together of elements against the shape of the state, a reminder that, without the Pacific and Columbia River, we'd look like Kansas. In addition to the state shape, we have state nickname, Mt. Rainier, a dying salmon, and a roll-over for the state apple-growers. I'm just surprised the powerful asparagus lobby didn't get their mitts on this. Brutally uninspired.

Rating: D=Real Lame


Better, commemorating the first siting of Fishzilla, the giant tail-walking salmon that haunts the wide lakes that surround the base of Mt. Rainier. Actually, this coin is gifted with both a natural scene and a bit more animation than is normal for a coin. Plus, as a bonus, the salmon shown doesn't have the rictus grin of a spawning and soon-to-perish fish. I kinda like this one, and we could do worse. And I think that Fishzilla could take on Minnesota's giant loon any day of the week.

Rating: B= Not Bad


I am really partial to this one - one image that strongly underscores the uniqueness of Washington State. No other state could use a NW Native American killer whale (well, maybe Alaska, but I understand they're going to use a drilling rig punching through the head of a polar bear). This would a distinctive coin. The tipping point would be feel - would it give me the intersting surface of the Connecticut Quarter's tree, or the parking-slug emptiness of the Texas "big nothing" coin? I really, really like the design.

Rating: A=Real Cool.

So go vote - they have half a million votes in the queue already, and the Killer Whale is currently in the lead!

Performance: Bertholt and Me

Great Men of Genius created and performed by Mike Daisey, directd by Jean-Michele Gregory, Capitol Hill Arts Center, April 6, 7, 8 and 9.

So when we were at the REP last weekend (after the play, before the resturant quest), the Lovely Bride picked up one of the postcard promos for monologuist Mike Daisey's latest work. We knew Daisey from his 21 Dog Years: Doing Time on Amazon.Com, and I really liked his geek-brother style, The flier was for Great Men of Genius, a set of "bio-logues" on Bertolt Brecht, P. T. Barnum, Nikola Tesla, and L. Ron Hubbard. Liked the artist, liked the subject matter. Sure, we can do the Thursday show.

Then the wrinkle, the small print, as it were - he is actually doing four separate monologues on four separate nights - First Brecht tonight, Barnum Friday, Tesla Saturday, and Hubbard wrapping on Sunday. And with the Lovely Bride's work schedule, we could make Brecht and Tesla, but not Barnum and Hubbard. So we did get up to Cap Hill for CHAC, a nice space with a brick wall background and mostly full house, for the first one in the series.

Now monologuists are one of those few jobs where you are forgiven, nay, you are expected, to talk about yourself at length. In addition to Daisey, Spalding Grey and Josh Kornbluth fit this model - their lives become their subject matter. So it should not be a surprise that these bio-logues are not Daisey channeling these various 20th Cent. Geniuses, or even providing a hard and fast biography of the Great Men (though he catches the high point and illuminates a few shadows along the way). Rather, the lives of his subjects are springboards of how they intersect with Daisey's past and allow Daisey to compare his own experiences with those of his subject. Brecht enters through Daisey's theater class background, with the concepts of alienism and the epic theatre of ideas.

Alienism, the best I can figure out, is the disengagement of viewer from the work, usually carried out through unsympathetic main characters, to better allow the ideas and purpose of the piece ultimately resonate with the viewer. This is of course anathema to my own style, where I am usually looking to create bridges between reader and character, the better to "sell" my concepts to an increasingly-sympathetic audience. Daisey, in one of the first of many solid laughs of the night, points out that this is why so much bad theatre is called "Brechtian" - both it and Brecht's work makes you not care about the characters.

[The Lovely Bride was a BIG Brecht fan when she was young, and she's the one that explained all this to me. And then explained it to me again. And then explained it a third time, by which point we had gotten home and she is now under the misconception that I understood it. Please don't tell her otherwise].

So anyway, we get Brecht's life and Daisey performing Brecht. Brecht's relationship to a Praetorian Guard of female fellow-playrights and Daisey's own relationship with his director/lovely bride. Brecht's time in Hollywood and Daisey's, at the same theater that The Life of Galileo debuted at. Brecht dealing with the HUAC as a real honest-to-god communist (though wasn't a party member because he was cheap) and Daisey's own Libertarian attempt at overly free-speech. It is Brecht and Daisey, Daisey and Brecht.

So does he pull it off? Oh yeah. There are parts that he had gathered the small audience (100? 120?) into a sympathizing, supportive band of brothers, and parts where he got extreme reactions from individual members of the audience, striking personal memories through his own (To the people taping that evening - the loud, rattling laughter during the discussion of Daisey and his wife/director going over notes at 3 AM? That laugh belongs to the Lovely Bride. Yes, its mirrored experiences when we work together - yes, Daisey takes it better than I do).

So it feels like a shakedown flight, a trying out of material to see what works and what sits there. Daisey works from notes but not from a script, and while parts have the solid patter of someone who has worked out the discussion in their head to the ultimate fineness, other parts feel like they are still searching for the right word, the right angle, the right something to hit them out of the park. But he hits pretty darn often.

So yes, I'm looking forward to the Tesla monologue, and I'm thinking of hitting the Hubbard one alone (though I'll bet that one will be packed). I'm looking forward to what Daisey has to say. And that's a compliment for any storyteller.

More later,

A Writer's Life

So further down the page you have an update on the new job, in particular how it has really moved around my biological clock as well as my writing habits. In particular, how I was doing my writing in the morning and then just collapsing when I got home at night.

Well, I have to fess up, while it sounds good on paper, the new process wasn't really working, and I have returned to my nightowl ways.

The morning writing worked OK, particularly for short stuff (like this blog), but over a longer haul it was more difficult to get up and into a groove when I knew that in an hour (forty-five minutes, twenty minutes) I would have to rise from my task and head out.

But writing in the evening? All you're doing is putting off sleep.

And it shows in the writing. I've been working on (and been late on) a short story (more on that when it is accepted). And the text flow has been choppy, more centered on vignettes, than a smooth flow. And it has taken forever. So this week I have started the writing process at ten or so, gone to one, and then crashed. It has been more productive, since the wrap point is determined by me, not the clock.

In addition, in the evening I'm a little less active and bouncy (and therefore less easily distracted), which is important when you have access to the Internet.

The end result is that the short story first draft is done, and I am just a little frayed around the edges. But that feels . . . normal.

More later,

Report from the Front

It is the middle of the week, and I am wrapped up with finishing another project, but this needs to be shared.

We've covered a lot of Katrina news here, and I don't want people to think that just because the news has fallen off (what with was and scandals and other stuff), things have mysteriously and miraculously improved on that front. The city remains mortally stricken. This was posted by Poppy Z. Brite, New Orleans native (still) and author, who is still struggling with the devastation, and has been going through five stages of grief like they were mounted on a twenty-sided die. She has given permission for reposting:

Not OK

Occasionally I'm asked by friends Not From Here, "New Orleans is better now, right? You had Mardi Gras!" or "Are you doing OK?" or some variation. Sometimes, particularly if they're contemplating a visit, I even try to reassure them: it's very possible to have a good, safe time here; the French Quarter is fine; lots of restaurants and bars are open. In truth, though, New Orleans and most of its inhabitants are very much Not OK. I present to you a baker's dozen facts about life in the city seven months after the storm. Some are large, some small. I think many of them will surprise you.

1. Most of the city is still officially uninhabitable. We and most other current New Orleanians live in what is sometimes known as The Sliver By The River, a section between the Mississippi River and St. Charles Avenue that didn't flood, as well as in the French Quarter and part of the Faubourg Marigny. In the "uninhabitable sections," there are hundreds of people living clandestinely in their homes with no lights, power, or (in many cases) drinkable water. They cannot afford generators or the gasoline it takes to run them, or if they have generators, they can only run them for part of the day. They cook on camp stoves and light their homes with candles or oil lamps at night.

2. There is a minimal police presence, and most of it is concentrated in the Sliver. Homes in other parts of the city are still being looted, vandalized, and burned.

3. Many parts of the city have had no trash pickup -- either FEMA or municipal -- for weeks. Things improved for a while, but now there are nearly as many piles of debris and stinking garbage as there were right after the storm.

4. There are no street lights in many of the "uninhabited" sections, which makes for very dark nights for their residents.

5. Many of the stoplights, including some at large, busy intersections, still don't work. They have become four-way stops (with small, hard-to-see stop signs propped up near the ground) and there are countless wrecks.

6. There is hardly any medical care in the city. As far as I know, only two hospitals and an emergency facility in the convention center are currently operating. Emergency room patients, even those having serious symptoms like chest pains, routinely wait eight hours or more to be seen by a doctor. We have, I believe, 600 hospital beds in a city whose population is approaching (and may have surpassed) 250,000.

7. Most grocery stores, many drugstores, and countless other important retail establishments are only open until 5, 6, or at best 8:00 PM because of the lack of staffing. This is only an inconvenience for me, but it's crippling for people who work "normal" hours.

8. The city's recycling program has been suspended indefinitely. We talk about restoring the wetlands that could buffer us from another storm surge, but every day we throw away tons of recyclables that will end up in the landfills that help poison our wetlands.

9. Cadaver dogs and youth volunteers gutting houses are still finding bodies in the Lower Ninth Ward. Of course these corpses are just skeletons by now -- the other day they found a six-year-old girl with an older person, possibly a grandmother, located near her -- and they may never be identified. The bodies are hidden under debris piles and collapsed houses. This is in the same section of town that some of the politicians are aching to bulldoze.

10. Thousands of people who lived in public housing were forcibly removed from their homes. It is now being suggested by much of the current power structure, including our very liberal Councilman at Large Oliver Thomas, that they not be allowed back into these homes unless they can prove they had jobs before the storm or are willing to sign up for job training. (Many of you may agree with this, and I did too, sort of, until I really thought about it. Hadn't they already qualified for the housing? What about the ones who had jobs that don't exist anymore? How can they find jobs in New Orleans if they don't live here?)

11. There are still flooded, wrecked, and abandoned cars all over the streets, parked in the neutral grounds, and in many cases partly submerged in the canals out East. Now that it's campaign time, Mayor Nagin is trying to come up with a solution for this, but he thinks maybe we should wait for FEMA to do it (!!!!!) and he claims the best removal offer he's gotten so far was "written on the back of a napkin."

12. Many of the FEMA trailers -- you know, the ones costing taxpayers $70,000 each -- have been delivered to homeless New Orleanians but cannot be lived in because the city doesn't have enough people to come out and do electrical inspections, and the trailers need a separate hookup instead of being hooked into the house's power supply, and a dozen other damn fool things. While these trailers sit empty, there is an easily constructed, far more attractive structure called a "Katrina cottage" that could easily be built all over south Louisiana. It costs about $25,000 less than the flimsy, uncomfortable trailers. FEMA refuses to use it because they're not allowed to provide permanent housing.

13. A large percentage -- I've heard figures ranging from 60 to 75% -- of current New Orleanians are on some form of antidepressant or anti-anxiety drug. The lines at the pharmacy windows have become a running joke. When a visiting "expert" gave a Power Point presentation on post-traumatic stress disorder recently, the entire audience dissolved into hysterical laughter.

Appropo of nothing, we are now less than two months away from the 2007 Hurricane Season.

More later,

Restaurant Quest

So the play started at 2 and let out about 3:30, and the Lovely Bride and I decided to do dinner up near Seattle Center. And that turned out to be a mistake.

We normally hit Racha, a Thai place at the northwest corner of the Seattle Center, but we had done that two weeks before and were looking for something else. A new restaurant, Moxie, had opened nearby, but they didn't open until 4. So the Lovely Bride suggested the Melting Pot, a Fondue Restaurant. Fondue never did it for me, but I was good for it. But they didn't open until 4 either.

I think you know where we're going here. We hit a couple resturants - none of them opened before 4. So we walked through the Center, back to Moxie's after 4, and found that yes, they were open, but didn't serve dinner until 5:30 (their sign on the front window lies), but they did have bar food. So BACK to the Melting Pot, where, yes, they were open, but they were full up and the first opening they had was at 9 - would we want to come back in 5 hours?

Now, through the Monkey King's excellent Friend's List, I read Waiter Rant, a great little blog by a waiter in New York, who regularly confronts the irate couple that comes in without a reservation and demands a table (usually one reserved for a couple that met at the resturant and is coming in tonight to celebrate their 20th anniversary). But in this case the Melting Pot was stone-cold empty at opening, not a paying customer present, waitstaff leaning on the tables and examining the glasses for spots, and there was nothing available for the next five hours.

I think I've mentioned that the Lovely Bride runs a tax office, and this is their busy season. But even they keep a number of slots available for the walk-in trade, since those people are where you draw your regular customers from in future years. But apparently the Melting Pot is doing so well, it doesn't have to worry about stuff like that. And mind you, these are restaurants that are within walking distance of two full theaters that let out at 3:30-4ish - theater-goers who are apparently trained to go directly to their cars and drive back to Bellevue to get something to eat.

And I've noticed this odd restaurant/theatre disconnect in the program books at the REP as well - from the Pittsburgh Public Theatre and the Milwaukee Rep, I am used to seeing local restaurants taking little ads to drum up post-show trade. Here? Not so much.

Where did we end up? At the bottom of the hill, near Lake Union, at a place called Bonefish Grill - Its a chain, and it was OK - the halibut and bacon-wrapped scallops were excellent, but the tuna was a little tough and the breading on the calimari bland. Service was great and I would definately give it a second shot. It had a few people as we entered and was pretty active by the time we left.

Now, there has been some gripes from the local eateries that, in the event of another Key Arena expansion, they will have to carry the freight of a continuing tax to effectively support their own competition. Normally, I'm with the little guys against the bigs, but after this little experience, unable to find a good sitdown place at 4 PM on a weekend, my sympathy for them is minimal - maybe now they will have to go looking for customers as opposed to keeping banker's hours.

Oh, and my desire for cheese-covered bread? Definitely reduced.

More later,

Play: Life in Wartime

9 Parts of Desire by Heather Raffo. Seattle Repertory Theatre, through April 15

Ah, the one woman show - another potentially perilous part of the theater experience, but the Rep tends to do it well. Not only I am thinking about Lily Tomlin's The Search for Sign of Intelligent Life in the Universe from a few years back, or Sandra Tsing Loh's Sugar Plum Fairy, a show I dreaded in theory and enjoyed in reality, but also Theresa Rebeck's Bad Dates, which is known in the household as "the Shoe Play". I dodged out of it, the Lovely Bride took a friend, and thought it was delightful and I would have enjoyed it (Such that it has become the standard shorthand for male sluggishness to engage - "Well, you never went to the Shoe Play, either").

And there is this - 9 Parts of Desire, which is a nine-character, one-woman show on Iraqi women. The title comes from the old story of how god divided desire into ten parts, and gave nine of those parts to woman. And while the concepts of husbands, lovers, long-distance relationships, and others float through these women's serial narations, this doesn't seem to be about love, but rather about the destruction of a culture and a civilization.

The stories pull no punches as the horrors of the Saddam Hussein's regime and the destruction of the wars (Iran, First Gulf, Second Gulf). These are women from a world rolling backwards, where the evil is rewarded and incautious truth mercilessly punished. They are victimized but do not see themselves as victims. Their world has been shredded into bits. Some have left and feel drawn to return. Some have remained and feel the tug to leave. Doctor, Artist, Intellectual, much-married Bedouin, Street Vendor, Teeny-Bopper, American TV Viewer. All are pulled into the maelstrom.

Actress Nalja Said moves effortlessly from one role to the next in serial style, giving each woman her own presence and style. I connected with the artist, parleying off parts of her soul for survival and advancement under Saddam. The Lovely Bride gelled with both the second-Generation teen watching her uncles' homes be destroyed on CNN and the whiskey-swilling refugee in London, trying to give background to the struggle and explain why she won't go back, this time.

What the play does well is provide a spectrum of women, from smart to foolish, from elite to struggling, and shows it is as impossible to encapsulate the land in nine women in ninety minutes as it is to capture it in a two-minute bit on the evening news. It does have the horror-show of a civilized land destroyed from within and without. It has a nasty frisson to it all, a feeling that yes, with a proper nudge here and bit of finesse there, it can happen here.

In the end, however, the play is a collection of nine individuals talking, what links between them tenuous and late in the play. The Lovely Bride thinks that treating it as a real play with nine actresses would have strengthened it, but I disagree. I think a straight-line narative would have forced the play like a river being channeled to a set goal and a set resolution. What is here is chaos, what these women's world has become, and the end does not resolve neatly. Like a river, it leaves you with muddy water and reflections at the end. and I don't know if I would tidy up the events to fit any of the potential messages in the least.

It was a troubling play, and that seems to be the whole point.

More later,