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Second, for those of you heading to Wiscon, I'm pleased to note that you'll be able to find my little poem "Encantada" in Stone Telling's Here, We Cross chapbook, which will be available at the con. Also available at the con, a book I'm not in, but which is also edited by the same person who brought us Stone Telling in the first place, Rose Lemberg: The Moment of Change. Rumor has it that if you go to the launch party for that particular book you will get cookies. Excellent poetry AND cookies, yay!
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Here is a very detailed response to the settlement from one literary agent, which also contains some very interesting statistics about ebook pricing. Long, but worth a look.
I must confess myself disappointed. Previous reports chatted about missiles zooming over London, so with that as a start, I was rather hoping that between gymnastics and swimming events, we'd get to see lasers! Or, barring that, arm all of the archery teams with flaming arrows, and have the fences put their foils on fire, because that would be pretty awesome. Instead London is just going to go boom!
I admit also that having only toured the Thames on one of those little tourist boats (the trip down to Hampton Court -- that was fun) I'm not as familiar with London or the Thames as I'd like to be: are boats on the Thames really supposed to pose that much of a threat?
Meanwhile, in related Olympics news, our mail keeps threatening that we are just NOT going to TRULY appreciate the Olympics unless we get Dish TV like RIGHT NOW (presumably so I can get used to it and know how to flip the channels -- Dish TV must be quite aware of my ongoing issues with the remote for the digital receiver we currently have.) But they haven't mentioned the possibility of real live laser or sonic weapons battles. Their missed opportunity.
Years back Marvel Comics had a hilarious little comic called "Damage Control," featuring ordinary humans who had the unhappy job of cleaning up after superheroes and supervillains -- and trying to present them with the bill. I rather hope that Tony Stark's insurance bills will be a subplot in either the next Iron Man or Avengers flick.
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In completely unrelated news, I am feeling considerably more cheerful and relaxed today, either because of some unexpectedly good publishing news (combined with a rejection slip, but you can't have everything, and at least this time the rejection slip was mingled with decent news); finally managing to finish a short story this year (it's more than past time) and get close to finishing a second; adding bits to Sekrit Project; and watching my brother invest in some more plants, to fill the back yard with greenery and give a bit of a green wall between us and the neighbors on one side. Also, coffee with coconut syrup, which is a reason for living.
I'm always amazed at how much better I feel right after depression creeps away; I don't particularly like myself at those periods (and I don't think anyone else likes me either), and end up oversharing in a desperate need for validation, and end up regretting that afterwards, instead of just, well, living. As this morning. The difference is just...I often don't have the words.
These are really light, fun little reads, even if, as in any series of this length, the quality invariably varies. This was not one of the better books, but still entertaining.
Longer version: Things go boom! Tony Stark quips! Thor makes sure we can all see how well cut he is! The one woman on the team isn't given any superpowers, but makes up for it by actually doing kick ass stuff. The film otherwise massively flops the Bechtel test, although it does spend quality time staring at the butts of the three women characters with speaking lines. As films do. (Gwyneth Paltrow arrives briefly for the twin jobs of snarking and showing off her legs.) I would have been offended if we had not gotten some equal exploitive time with Thor and to a considerably lesser degree Captain America and Hawkeye. Frankly, I think the next Thor film should just cut to the chase and call itself, "Thor: The Abs. The Shoulder Muscles. The Butt." to, you know, save time. But I digress.
This is not, to put it mildly, a deep movie. It is, I grant you, a bit more thoughtful than last year's Thor, but that's not saying much. Sure, a couple of characters try to speak deeply about freedom and choices and trust and heroics and an old guy stands up to remind us that Fascism and Dictators are like, bad, yo, and Captain America isn't really sure that the current world is an awesome place, and some Wall Street offices suffer collateral damage, yay, and if you head out to the bathroom you might miss the conversation about Guilt. But whatever. It's not going for deep. It's going for fun.
And that it delivers, mostly thanks to Robert Downey, Jr. (Iron Man) who is like, wait, I get to make fun of my coworkers? More please! Tom Hiddleston (Loki), who apparently looked at the script, said, well, if I have to say this crap, I may as well say it with far too much conviction, and, the surprise, Mark Ruffalo as HULK SMASH. He's also pretty good as Bruce Banner, but, let's face it, HULK SMASH.
AND SMASH AND SMASH. It's the main reason to see the film.
Also, there is a blink and you will miss it Oz reference. Just saying.
Looking forward to seeing the half hour of deleted scenes on the DVD, which apparently include Captain America meeting up with his love interest from the previous film. Also not here: any scenes between Thor and Natalie Portman "I'm not an astrophysicist, I just play one with great abs," although the film does include two lines of dialogue to explain her absence, without using the phrase "Ms. Portman demanded way too much money for a cameo" which was impressive.
Snarky version:
( As a reader service. )
1) The weekly Tor.com post, about the next book in the Freddy series, The Story of Freginald, has popped up on Tor.com.
2) And as long as I'm chatting about Tor.com, also appearing on the site today is a preview of the cover for A Memory of Light, the last of the Wheel of Time books The double decade tradition of "And this is showing us what, exactly" continues apace!
3) My contributor's copy of The Baum Bugle also arrived today, along with the notice that The Baum Bugle is looking for a new editor. That editor will not be me, nor will I have any involvement in the hiring process, but if you are interested in Oz and editing stuff, I have the contact info.
4) After giving us one final delightful taste of coolness in April, the summer heat appears to be marching in, alas without the summer rain. Sigh.
I assume this is an attempt to get people to pay for cable TV instead of skipping cable and just watching shows on Hulu.com instead. I also doubt this will work, because:
1) Speaking as a Hulu user, the main thing I watch on Hulu.com? Shows from broadcast TV (Fox, NBC, ABC) or, more rarely, Syfy and the USA Network. Thanks to the scattered way Syfy kinda throws, or doesn't throw, their shows up online, however, I've mostly switched to waiting for the DVDs from the library for those shows, and I'd have no problem doing this with Burn Notice, the only show I'm still watching from the USA Network. (I gave up on White Collar, which kept descending into greater levels of inanity, but this isn't that rant.)
Most of these shows? Do not require cable TV to view in this area. Granted, getting NBC (which apparently has its broadcast tower someplace on Mars) can occasionally require a mystical dance and a lot of beer, but the other stations come in just fine, thanks, from Daytona through Tampa. In fact, the only reason I bother with Hulu.com is --
2) I much, much prefer the experience of viewing television through streaming or DVDs. Fewer or no commercials, the ability to pause a show at any point and return whenever, should, for instance, a cat suddenly have a freak out attack, the ability to rewind a show at any point and see bits I missed thanks to a freaked out cat or if I need to confirm, "She said WHAT?" (ok, that's pretty much just Revenge this year), the ability to watch the show again immediately if it was really really good (ok, pretty much Downton Abbey, and not this season), and most critically, the ability to watch whenever I want. If this season's attempt to watch Fringe live has taught us anything, it is that I am just not good at remembering when particular shows are on. And sometimes I'm just not physically up to watching any given show at any given time.
I can't be the only person avoiding cable television not merely because of the cost (it's a factor, but not the main one) but because it's offering something I really don't want: live access to shows I don't really want to see, with lots of commercials.
Sure, I considered getting cable television with a DVR recording in preparation for the Summer Olympics (something both household members would watch) and for season two of Game of Thrones (which I would watch.) But in the end, I didn't want it. And that's the chief problem with this idea: customers are not leaving cable television because of Hulu.com (or, for that matter, Amazon or iTunes.) They are leaving because they don't want cable television. Will I change my mind later? Well, that depends on cable television, not Hulu.
Naturally, although the Little One attempted to help in the assembly, and both adore boxes of all kind, now that it's assembled, they are both steadily ignoring it. Well, to be fair, I'm not sure the Grey One knows it's here -- she is currently doing some very important napping on my bed just now, and is not to be disturbed.
I think I'll join her. Feeling kinda zonked from that - it's harder to assemble a plane from cardboard than you might think.
Writer Roald Dahl had perhaps two or three calm years in his life, those right after leaving school, when he worked for Shell Oil. Otherwise, his life was crammed with enough incident to fill three dozen biographies: losing a sibling at a young age, getting severely beaten at school, flying, crashing, spying, marrying a Hollywood actress still in love with Gary Cooper, losing a child at the age of seven and watching another beloved child suffer the effects of a horrific accident, nearly losing his first wife to an unexpected major stroke, sleeping with various famous and beautiful women, conducting a years long affair with the woman who would become his second wife, and, of course, writing books.
It's a lot. To his credit, Donald Sturrock manages to get most of this into this fairly long book, in a dispassionate, clear way. Sometimes too dispassionately: Roald Dahl was, by the accounts related in this book, brutal to his wife after her stroke as he pushed her towards recovery, but Sturrock almost bends over backwards to absolve the guy. He deals with Dahl's pain at losing his eldest daughter – a child both parents later idealized – almost clinically. And because Dahl's son Theo, who suffered a terrible accident with resulting brain damage, is still alive and helped contribute to the book, many issues with Theo are notably glossed over, with the focus mostly on how the accident increased Dahl's interest in brain shunts.
Dealing with Dahl's shifting attitudes towards race is another place where Sturrock struggles – partly because Dahl did. He accepted the concept of British superiority while living in Africa, but later changed his mind and argued for racial equality. When he was accused of racist attitudes in the first edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory he was horrified, but swiftly agreed to changes after the NCAAP pointed out the problems with the original depictions of the Oompa-Loompas, in a case of unintentional but institutional, unthinking racism. (He had originally planned to make Charlie, its young protagonist, black.) He had several Jewish friends, but did not think kindly of the Zionist movement or various Israeli leaders and said various offensive things. And so on.
A book like this almost invariably becomes a gripping read, even despite – or because of – the name dropping that was the result of Dahl's years of work in DC as a diplomat and a spy, and later his life with his actress wife, split between Hollywood and England. (After her stroke, Frank Sinatra stopped by. That sort of thing.) It also becomes a question of choosing which story might be true: Dahl changed his retellings of past events frequently, and his first wife disputed many of his versions – but disputed these versions after the stroke which by all accounts changed her personality and severely disrupted her memory. Other issues, particularly Dahl's work as a spy, remain classified. Sturrock does his best to reconstruct events; where he cannot, he quotes liberally from interviews with various people who knew Dahl.
Dahl was notorious for fighting with editors, agents and publishers; friends, family members and neighbors; and Britain's Inland Revenue. (I have to note that one common thread in all biographies of writers who lived and published in Britain in the post-World War II years: fighting with Inland Revenue.) But he was also notorious for unexpected and fabulous acts of generosity, of loyalty to friends, and above all, the ability to entertain children.
I'm not exactly sure when I'll be reaching the Roald Dahl books in the Tor.com reread projects – and I won't be reading all of them – but this was a good introduction to the imagination behind them.
2) The latest Freddy the Pig entry is up at Tor.com. This one covers Freddy the Detective, which was a really fun book. But you may not be able to read it, because...
3) Also today, Tor.com released a small sample of the very last Wheel of Time book, in an attempt to reassure those of us skeptical that we will ever see the end of this series that it really, really, really is coming. Not for months, but still. Naturally this caused the website to crash earlier, so you may experience problems getting to my post.
4) Adding pear-infused balsamic vinegar to a mozzarella and tomato salad is an excellent idea. I just thought you should know.
What does this mean for those of you following me on Dreamwidth and Livejournal? Absolutely nothing - I'll still be doing my main blogging here. The Wordpress site will be mainly used for professional announcements and that sort of thing, with occasional crossposts of things like con reports and so on.
In the offchance anyone from Livejournal's owners is reading this, however, the main reasons I set up a Wordpress account are:
1. Ease of use -- this was much easier than setting up and coding a website. Should I ever get to the coding of the website bit, I can always download the Wordpress software, integrate it into the website, and go on from there.
2. A more professional, clean look. When I initially started my Livejournal, nearly ten years ago now, this was not a huge concern, but it is now. Livejournal has admittedly been offering more themes and so on, but customization is still limited, and many of those themes are a bit too cutesy for what I want to do -- or difficult to read.
3. The ability to add multiple pages, and to be able to customize the "about me" page and separate it into several pages. (This was the biggie; my list of publications has become rather unwieldy to be put on just one page, and the poetry and non-fiction in particular gets lost.)
4. Easy tweaking of the blog and setup. (Not that I've actually taken advantage of this, mind you.)
Please note, Livejournal, that none of the things I was looking for included games, the ability to send electronic gifts to anyone, the ability to find Livejournal and like it on Facebook, your site logging me out on a regular basis and, when doing so, sending me to the login page with a convenient ad instead of directly to the page I was heading to, and then failing to remember what page I was heading to, which is not always my own blog page, LJ, a cute little "scissor" image on LJ-cuts, putting ads on my blog/user info page when I have specifically paid to keep my blog ad-free, and so on.
You've pretty much already lost the game/silly quiz/one sentence updates to Facebook (and to a considerably lesser extent Twitter.) What you have left are people who really want to blog, to record their thoughts in a journal, to interact at some length with friends and readers from around the world. Play to that strength.
In this household, one black and white furry creature is alternating between being pressing against me and being adorable and supportive, and wailing because I will not allow him to go play with the squirrels who have temporarily taken residence on the front porch (zipping between the porch and the red maple as we await the next series of storms), and one small grey furry creature has spent an anxious morning trying to decide: sleep in safety, but without a pillow, behind the TV stand/TV where no one can see her, or beneath the great bed where no one can see her or -- or -- does she dare continue recent activities, and sleep in the light of the guest bed, after turning on the water in the bathroom sink and failing to turn it off?
Decisions. Decisions.
2. The Freddy the Pig reread continues with Freddy Goes to the North Pole, which didn't have alligators, which made me sad.
In a related note the library and I managed to simultaneously mess up my ordering of these books, so I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to be able to read them in order after all. Erk. Oh well.
It reminded me just why I need to turn of the TV before the local news comes on.
It's not that I don't want to be informed. But.
On Sunday, some bicyclists found two burning bodies on the side of a bike trail. That is awful enough. Today, they were identified as two teenagers from a local high school, which is even worse. Just a horrible, horrible story, and not surprisingly, the lead story on the news.
Now, I have to say that I can't immediately think of a good way to handle this, other than perhaps retelling the bit about the bicyclists and the identification of the teenagers, especially since the cops are apparently not releasing any other information except the identities of the victims, so the media doesn't have much to go on here. Even with that, though, they failed.
Because instead of quoting the cops, or friends of the victims (who understandably aren't talking) or parents of the victims (ditto) or even the typical concerned neighbor of "It's really scary -- it makes you feel unsafe, you know?" or even bicyclists, they went to the high school and interviewed some students, and added that in an exclusive, they had learned that "one of the victims called a friend, apparently by accident."
The MORE THAN SLIGHT PROBLEM WITH THIS?
That report was based on interviews with the students, who were repeating what they had heard in school. In other words, mere rumors.
I don't blame the students. They said, and I am quoting, "I heard that there were sounds of running...." [on a phone call that one of the victims VERY allegedly made to an unnamed friend. They admitted that they had not heard the phone call in question and that they were only repeating what they'd heard in school.
I think we all know how quickly incredibly false information can spread in school.
ABC assured us that they had learned that the call in question really happened -- while ALSO telling us (and showing us) that the alleged receiver of that call had refused to talk to them on camera. They told us what his friends had said about the call.
And that was the SOURCED part of the story. ABC also told us that the murder happened because of a $500 drug deal gone bad, with no accompanying police statement.
Look. I know the media is desperate to tell the story; I assume the community wants to know what the hell happened -- I mean, I want to know what happened. But is it really too much to ask the media to wait for a statement from an actual witness or the cops, instead of reporting what a bunch of high schoolers happen to be saying?
Years later, I (somewhat reluctantly) shelled out the money for a little one, and promptly killed it.
"Did you keep it inside?" asked a bonsai expert later.
I'd bought it from inside. "Er, yes."
"Well, that did it."
Which was a friendly if probably inaccurate way of deflecting blame.
Anyway, this weekend my brother and I briefly popped into the Winter Garden Rose and Bloom Festival, which had a lot of roses, kettle corn, clowns, little trains, jewelry, pumpkin bread, and yes, other plants. He wanted another paw-paw plant and some other Florida native plants.
Me...
Well, see, some of the booths had bonsai.
I was only planning to get one.
We ended up with two -- a little pine tree one (my choice) and a little ficus tree one (his choice.) They aren't dead yet. Unfortunately, although the ficus doesn't know this yet, it is eventually going to be put into a pot that I am theoretically making in my ceramics class. I say theoretically because as it turns out I am very very bad at ceramics, partly because the class is really exhausting, and after an hour I'm kinda incapable of doing anything in it, partly because I keep forgetting various Important Steps, and mostly because I have no visual imagination. This is what usually happens:
Instructor: What is the clay saying to you?
Me, sadly: Give me to someone that can understand me!
Instructor: No, no. I mean -- look at the shape. What shape does it suggest to you?
Me, looking: Clay.
Or this:
Instructor: Now, if you want, you can add a little bird to this.
Me, excited: Bird? (Several happy minutes with clay, turning to several unhappy minutes when my clay fails to do what the instructor's clay just did.)
Instructor, later: Ah, what a nice abstract look! Well done! Gives a sense of a fish.
Me: Zzzzzz.
The instructor's encouraging hope that even I could use the easy to use bonsai molds turned out to be slightly overoptimistic. I suspect we shall actually be investing in a bonsai pot.
But I digress. Along with the bonsai my brother also picked up some paw-paw plants, I think because he likes to say the word "paw-paw," and a large blueberry bush that already had ripening blueberries on it.
Thus this post, since today I was able to head out and pick an entire pint of blueberries from the backyard. This may never happen again, since chances are good that we will a) kill the bush or b) only manage to get one of the two bushes to flower, thus not allowing whichever one that flowers to pollinate and get little berries, but I thought it should be recorded.
And then I stopped to look at the little bonsai. The one I picked -- the one that's a little pine tree, bent over, a little tiny bit of beauty, holding magic in every leaf.
Hopefully I won't kill it. I have left it outside.
In related news, we had a slight tinge of wildfire smoke in the air last night, which seems fortunately gone now. Hoping -- really hoping -- for rain tonight and then this weekend when a frontal boundary comes through. Not just to bring my roses back into shambling zombie life.
Other Jabberwocky stories also made the list, as did several friends, which was pretty awesome. Congrats to all!
