Well I had meant to start writing Cawdor this week, but that just didn’t happen. Between the hellishly busy pace at the day-job and two days sucked into the Big Bang Experience, I got nada done this week.
Still, I am excited. This will be a challenging novel for me to write and I am looking forward to it.
This news report – on our local station I’m sad to say — is a prime example of the mindlessness that passes a Tv news today. Really? With all the problems in the world, hell with all the problems in San Diego a dysfunctional local government, crumbling infrastructure, and all the rest these bozos spend valuable air time and resources on a piece about the dangers of a freaking Ouija board?
It’s cardboard, ink, and plastic for god’s sake nothing more. There is no magic to the freaking ouija board. They’re made in china. What do these people think is going over there? Blood Sorcerers enchanting each piece as it gets printed, stamped, and packaged?
Look at who they went to for opinion; mindless drone who are the types to give religious people bad names. I know a number of religious people and frankly they don’t think like this.
Oh Karen Thompson, so what if Ouija boards freaked you out as a kid. Lots of things freak lots of kids out. Clowns. Many a kid has endless nightmares about the clowns, shall do scary ‘news’ reports about them too?
Pastor Phelan? Spend a little less time worrying about cheap Chinese junk and a little more time about how to open hearts vs closing minds and I think you’ll be a little closer to god’s work.
The piece really went off the cliff when they went to the random internet comments as sources of opinion. Hell bells I was waiting for someone to comment that Hitler liked them or some other mind rotting garbage.
That 1st amendment protects fools and prophets alike.
Short post — I want one.
Longer post. I can’t afford to buy one right now and unlike Steven Colbert I can’t beg for one on television.
So here’s the deal I made with myself.
I can buy myself an iPad when I can pay for it entirely with monies earned from my writing. Not from my day job, not from tax overpayment returns and not from any gift cards, but solely from money paid to me for my writing.
It could be a long time before I get one.
As you may have seen on the news winter storms swept through souther California this week. San Diego is not set-up for storm and never deals well with rain.
On the worst day of the storm we had winds gusting to nearly sixty miles per hour and heavy rainfall. Our freeways were congested and power was failing all over the county. Trees also fell with alarming regularity. Below is a photo of just how lucky my sweetie-wife and I got on Thursday.
tThe building beyond the fallen tree is our condo building and our unit it just out of frame to the right. thursday night I walked up th steps on the right side of the frame, turned and went inside and totally failed on my spot roll in that I did not notice the tree. (It was night, but still that’s a pretty massive spot fail don’t you think?
Here’s a close up of the roots of this tree.
First, I am making a slight modification to my work resolution.
When I am working on outlines and plotting notes, that I only need to do five hundred words per night. I found that 1000 was too many. I could do it, and I have been doing it. However it was causing me to not fully develop my ideas. While I am constructing the plot it is important to take the time for feel out the flavor and nuance of each idea so that I can properly understand where it is taking me.
When I am working in narrative, that will require a 1000 words per work night before I can play.
Another change is that I am walking away from short stories for awhile. The last rejection actually hurt, and normally I have an iron armored hide when it comes to rejections. (Writing ones, emotional ones were always far far worse.) This one burned and it’s put me off short stories for the time being. I will focus entirely on Cawdor and other novels. (Anyway my black mood is perfect for writing Cawdor.)
No, this post isn’t about 2009 turning into 2010, ti’s about the memories that are fresh and vibrant in my head that have turned out to be 25 years old.
Way back in 1985 I was playing in a Starfleet Battles campaign. For those not in the know, Starfleet Battles is a game of ship-to-ship combat set in the Star Trek universe.
The game was a large and complex affair that just cried out for computer management. Sadly the makers of the game never seemed to understand that each addition, supplement, and rule errata contributed to making the game less and less playable. When I quite it had become the game you could not teach to new players.
Anyway in this campaign, players took on the roles of running star spanning empires, many that were in the original series and some that were created just for the game itself. (The game was a product of that time after the series was canceled but before the movies had gotten started. A curiously licensed product somehow outside of the control of Paramount.) I was the Gorn player. (Check the season one episode, Arena, to see the Gorns.)
Twenty five years latter I still remember the games, the players, the battles, and the man who ran all of it the incomparable Jimmy Diggs. Jimmy was man of great energy, fun, and vitality. When I knew him he was a security guard, but he went on to write scripts for episodes of Star Trek DS9, Star Trek Voyager, and other works.
How good were those times. No matter how good my times are now, and they are good, nor how much better they may grow, I’ll never have times like that again.
Over Christmas we had another attempted terror attack against America. By now I assume that everyone reading this blog knows that a young man smuggled explosives aboard an International flight — the bomb making materials were apparently in his underwear — and after determining that the aircraft was in American airspace, attempted to detonate it.
Only by a combination of luck and in competence did the device not explode, but merely burned. Even that could have been very bad had passengers not acted quickly and subduing the terrorist and putting out the fire.
It stupid that this man was able to smuggle the bomb-making material aboard. We have the technology to catch this crap. It’s back scatter x-rays.
These devices can image right through clothing down to the skin. The likelihood of getting contraband through such a system is much lower than with our current wand and pat down system. (Nothing is assured – a dopey scanner operator can still miss things, but this is so much better than what we have now.) We have not instituted these scanners because it is able to image people in the nude, right through their clothing.
Horrors, someone might see my wang.
Bloddy hell people, I’d rather have TSA people seeing an endless parade of naughty bits than not be able to see bombs. Hmmmm, nude or dead, I know which I’ll want to be.
The only reason to hold back this technology is that we are so scared of skin we’d literally rather die than have someone see some.
To quote Plan 9 from Outer Space…
“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”
One thing I hate in debate is the scoundrel’s technique of the ad hominem. I have no troubles with people who disagree with me. Hell, most of my friends disagree with me on a number of issues. That is fine and dandy, but insults to the person making an argument is simply a tool of bullies.
In the current debates on climate change and if mankind is a major contributing factor in any clime change the charge of denier gets thrown at people who express doubt about man-made global warming. This is really nothing more than a sly ad hominem attack. The most cultural known use of the term denier in political debates is of course for those who would deny that the Holocaust occurred during WWII. By referring to doubters of AGW (Anthropomorphic Global Warming) as deniers, supporters of AGW are trying to achieve to things.
The first is subliminally place doubters in the same emotional space to most people as deniers of the Holocaust. The second thing they are trying to do is establish AGW as a fact as firmly rooted in reality as the Holocaust itself.
The Holocaust is a fact. It is not a theory, it is not a hoax, it was the systematic murder of Jews, gays, Gypsies, and others by the NAZIs.
AGW is a hypothesis, it is not a fact. It’s not even a theory. In science a theory is a hypothesis that has withstood rigorous testing over an extended period of time. The Atomic Theory of matter is a theory, the Germ Theory of Disease is a theory, General Relativity is a theory. All of these started their scientific lives as a hypothesis and became theory as they proved themselves to be the best current description of how the world works.
The world is warming. I think there is enough evidence to support that statement. After all the Hudson River used to freeze solid enough that you could drag cannons across it and they used to hold winter fairs on the frozen Thames in England. Clearly we don’t get that cold anymore. That does not mean that AGW is true.
Mind you I am not saying that AGW is not true in the post. It might be the best hypothesis for describing the current climate and the apparent changes we are seeing, but it is not the only one. The Earth has been much cooler in the past and it has been much warmer in the past without any help from mankind at all. There are good and reasonable people – scientists and lay-people alike – who have serious questions about AGW. These people might be right, they might be wrong.
What is wrong is to call these people deniers as though they were apologist for Hitler, or flat earthers pretending we never went to the moon. Calling them names is nothing but an attack on the person. (I will grant you that not all people who questions AGW do so from a serious doubt of the science. There are many venal and frankly manipulative people who takes their positions purely out of the politics of the situation, but that applies to both sides.)
Show me facts. Show me testable experiments and simulations.
Do not call me a denier simply because I think the GCR hypothesis might explain thing as well as the AGW hypothesis.