Joe's Place

we rot in the molds of Venice
That's a good Hemingway article, Steve. American scholars have been working with Cuban ones for some time, rescuing all those papers from the Cuban climate, scanning and cataloguing everything. Gay and I know the Cuban who used to be in charge, Gladys Rodriguez, pretty well. Gay did a lot of everyday translating for her when we were down there, though she speaks English.

I don't recall Venice smelling bad when I was there five years ago in July, though most old cities in Europe to me smell faintly of ancient sewage. (So does New York, to be fair.) I found it one of the most delightful places I'd ever experienced: friendly people, great art and architecture, fine food. We have a fantasy of renting a pensione there some time when I have about a month's work to do, and not working too hard.

Have been busy entertaining and writing and painting. Another fine model yesterday, Nancy, an artist herself. Picture below on LiveJournal. Judith and I painted till noon, grabbed a sandwich and bicycled back, to go over at two and have tea with Bill Hutchinson, who wears many hats. He was wearing his collector hat, and wanted to show us the various things he'd acquired this year.

The weirdest thing was three elephant paintings from Thailand. I'd seen the Youtube movies of them in action -- the human in charge hands them brushes with different colors of paint, and they do creditable pictures of flowers and houses and, most weird, elephants. It's more animal trick than art, but there's a certain undeniable power to them.

He also had some impressive ancient statuary from China, and a delicate polychrome figure from the 19th century. Strangely carved amulets.

Since it was Judith's last day in the States -- we put her on a plane this morning -- I made us a purely American meal for a change. Fired up the Weber and grilled steaks, served along with foil-wrapped potatoes and corn on the cob and Brussels sprouts (well, maybe that's not too American). Then we watched our Academy Awards disk of _Slumdog Millionaire_, which that morning had won five Critic's Choice awards. It's an impressively complex movie, an Indian transformation of a Dickensian morality play through the device of a street urchin winding up on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" The cultural surround, from slum to palace, is the movie's strongest point for me, a breakneck travelogue through every stratum of Bombay society. Mumbai now. Some icky violence and underplayed sex and a triumphant Bollywood ending.

The night before, we went to a MOG, Moon Observers' Group, meeting, where we met at a member's driveway and set up a half-dozen telescopes. We looked at four craters and members of the club gave Powerpoint discussions of the characteristics and history of each crater. More fun than it sounds, especially being able to look at the craters after learning about them. I’ll have to pick a crater and do one, if we’re ever home for a meeting. (My Questar was the smallest scope there, but performed well in comparison with the large refractors and reflectors.)

I spent a couple of days putting together a cassoulet, and Friday night had Brandy and Christina over to partake of it. It was actually an Americanized version of it, made with duck and turkey, because I couldn’t find a goose in local stores. (Actually, I found one frozen at a local organic grocery. A woman went rummaging through the meat locker and finally came up with one, but it was free-range organic, she apologetically said, and was eighty bucks! I said thanks but no thanks, and she said, “Well, at least I can say I experienced an actual wild goose chase.” I could have kissed her for that, but she was a little young.) The six of us barely made a dent in it, but it freezes well.

The novel’s going well in spite of distractions.

Joe

(I got the Canon MX850 printer/scanner, and it works really fine.)

storing books
Gay and I have a slight but measurable chance of doing something along those lines. A small house went up for sale only a block away, just over the city line. I guess it's on the order of a hundred grand, maybe less. It would have room for tens of thousands of books. (And a cool office.)

We're already renting storage space for 5000+ books, which is a couple of hundred a month and just evaporates, no equity. At 4.5%, a 30-year mortgage on $100,000 is $507 a month. So it's roughly twice the payment to store those books, plus a few thousand of the ones hanging around the house, and get me a nice little office in tha bargain. Maybe a backup guest bedroom.

But it's kind of nice, living without a mortgage.

Had a very pretty model Saturday, Briany, a masseuse in her twenties. It was her first time modeling, and she has a flair for it. Hope to be seeing more of her.

Then yesterday Judith and I went out for the afternoon, drawing and painting on a walkway through the woods a few miles from here. Nice bike ride and very good light for painting. I'll put a couple of iPhone snaps on LiveJournal.

Endless round of parties and dinners. I've put on five pounds, which I guess is about par. I'll shed it by February, eating sensibly and going back to the gym.

(Went to my diabetes nutritionist yesterday and she was very happy with my progress. Even with the holiday flab, I've lost 12.5 pounds since last year, and my blood sugar numbers are getting down to non-diabetic.)

Work going well but I face two dental appointments in a row, today and tomorrow. No fun. I'll try not to put them into the novel.

Joe

guitar pictures
m_roderick wanted to see what the old Mexican guitar looks like . . . here are a couple of snaps . . . .

guitars
I'm sure that Terry's efforts on behalf of Alzheimer's research were a factor in the knighthood, but the citation itself is only about his literary virtues, which I think is good. (I should say "the citation as I read it on sff.net")

We had the usual crowd over for New Year's Day. I started cooking at 7:45 and finished around ten, egg casseroles and bacon for about thirty people, washed down with mimosas. No television. Lots of spirited conversation.

Around noon, Bill Hutchinson and Jennifer gave us a concert of close harmony on ballads and show tunes from the twenties, thirties, and forties, plus some Beatles and other soft rock. Expert and delightful. Bill has a huge range, with a pure-sounding falsetto coupled to a deep bass (after he's warmed up); Jennifer's alto can go down to a comfortable C-below-C, so their harmonies can trade off on high and low. Bill's guitar playing is expert but not showy, all over the fingerboard on a nylon-string classical he's been playing since he came back from Vietnam. Guitars improve with age, and so do some people.

The last guests left about nine. I poured the last of the champagne over ice and played the guitar for an hour or so. My own old classical, which Gay and I bought the summer I got back from Vietnam. We went to the town of Paracho, where most cheap Mexican guitars are made, and I bought the most expensive one I could find -- a thousand pesos, which was $88 at the time. The guy who made it didn't have a credit card machine, so he ran across town (literally, about two blocks) to use his brother's. It's an exotic blonde, the top, back, and sides brilliant yellow woods. To me it sounds as if it has greatly improved with age, but then my hearing is going . . .

Joe

home busy home
Putting together various factors, I think I'm going to go with an inkjet printer/scanner/fax/waffle iron combination, rather than go laser. They cost a third as much, or less, and weigh a _lot_ less, which is attractive, considering trying to maneuver in my cramped office. And Gay has a laser printer in her office, which I can use for big jobs.

This month's _Consumer Reports_ rates inkjets, and they recommend the Canon Pixma MX 850. Web response is pretty positive, too. Best Buy advertises it for $159.99. After the festivities I'll get one, unless somebody here knows they leak acid or explode.

Looking for something to go with a bottle of retsina, I found a great Moroccan recipe, Couscous a Sept Legumes, or "Cous-cous with Lamb and Seven Vegetables." Got a package of lamb chops and cut the meat from the bones, making stock with the bones. Cube the meat and let it simmer in stock and chopped ginger for about an hour. Then add a drained can of chick-peas and three peeled and chunked vegetables: turnip, acorn squash, and carrots. When they're almost done (half an hour) add a couple of zucchini cut in two-inch lengths and a handful of raisins. Simmer another twenty minutes and serve over cous-cous you've made with the stock.

Interesting complex flavor, with only the ginger. Those of us who like hot food added some _harissa_, which was ground cumin, black pepper, and cayenne, whisked with some olive oil.

We played Scrabble after dinner, and I'm afraid I whomped everybody both games. Triple-words with X's and Z's. Then an hour of music with a nice South African cabernet.

Got up at 4:30 to check out Saturn on the 7". I'd looked at it the previous night with the 3.5" Questar, and the rings were so close to edge-on they just looked like a bright line etched against the dark sky. With the 7" Mak at 210X, I was really at the limit of seeing, pretty turbulent, but I think I saw the barest hint of a dark gap between the rings and the planet. Left the scope set up in the back yard, and will check it again tonight, to get away from the party for a bit.

It's crass materialism, but I'm so happy to be back home with my kitchen, my guitars, my telescopes. There's a lot of stimulation at MIT, but a different kind here on my home turf. Settling back into being my Florida self.

Joe

got them low down college blues
I've noticed that myself, Lawrence, and puzzled over trying to generalize -- that is, does this writer have a "conversationalist" style and that writer an "academic" one? Of course, different social occasions may prompt different speaking styles. My next-door neighbor saw me on a local TV show and said "You talk the way you write, in semicolons." Maybe in interviews.

Dave, some years ago the MIT Physics Club invited me and Gay to a big Chinese dinner. We were late, and there were only three seats left, at the end of the long table. We got plates of food and said hello and sat down, and were promptly ignored (not unusual behavior for physicists or MIT students). Another guy about my age sat down in the last seat and we introduced ourselves as Joe and Doug.

We talked for awhile about various things, including physics and music, when it dawned on me. "Are you Douglas Hofstader?" I said. "Are you Joe Haldeman?" he said. A curious moment of revelation.

Picked up Judith Clute around midnight yesterday after a delay-plagued day of wending her way down from Maine. Curiously enough, the book she picked up for the flight was Wolf's _Proust and the Squid_, one of my own Christmas books. I'll start it when I finish Peter Sagal's _The Book of Vice_, a sort of how-to manual.

Played guitar and sang for a couple of hours last night (Judith is my best audience) and I noticed a cognitive glitch. I haven't played since August, and I tried to play from memory, without consulting the cheat-sheet taped to the back of the guitar. I had trouble remembering songs I've learned in the past few years, as opposed to twenty years ago, which is no surprise. But what was mildly surprising was that I found myself playing old songs like Childe ballads that haven't been in my repertoire since the seventies. Things I memorized and long since forgot.

Who knows what ouvres lurk in the hearts of men?

Today begins the ramp-up to the Monster Party on New Year's Eve. Gay and I, with our trusted Indian companions Rusty and Judith, are assaulting the Sam's store for consumables.

When things settle down, I'm going shopping for a color laser printer/scanner to go with the MacBook Air, which doesn't like either of my old ones. Time to upgrade anyhow. Any suggestions or warnings out there? Saw a Brother at Office Max for $600. I have a Brother at MIT (color inkjet printer/scanner) that's never given me any trouble.

"I got a brother at MIT, never gives me any trouble;
A sister goin' to Harvard who lives in a bubble . . .
I got those Cambridge Massachusetts
Low down college blues."

Joe

WRITING KINKY SEX
I finished _Small Town_ and agree with Dave -- Lawrence Block should stay away from sex. At least writing about it. (Actually, to be charitable, you have to note that it's really hard to write about kinky sex in a serious way. The reader's mind conjures up pictures that are either silly or unpleasant, or both.)

The book is curiously unsatisfying as a mystery, with two important factors left unresolved. A violation of genre protocol, but I guess you could argue that it's not, strictly speaking, a genre novel. You can read it as a straight novel with two strands, one about a serial killer and one about sex and control. One of the characters is a novelist, and Block gets in some sly comment there.

Joe

Santa was good
I got some good books, too, Dave -- Oliver Sacks's _Musicophilia_, finally out in paperback, Maryanne Wolf's _Proust and the Squid_ (about reading and the brain), _The Gun and the Pen_, which is about warfare and the novels of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner and _Baby, Let Me Follow You Down_, which is an illustrated history of the Cambridge tolk scene. Barbara gave me a huge strange coffee table book, Andrew Zuckerman's _Creature_, which is spare studio photographs of 150 wild animals, all against neutral white backgrounds. I think Judith might get some collage ideas from it.

And a tea carafe that really works. A shiny red modern thing called an Alfi, made in London. We have one up in Boston and know it will keep a pot of tea hot for twenty hours.

A nice Laban fountain pen, silver filigrees over ebony, probably the heaviest pen I own.

The program _Artrage Deluxe_, a painting/drawing toolkit.

Oh, and a beautiful set of stemless Bordeaux crystal. We saw them at a wine shop in Montreal last month, but they were way too delicate to try to pack. So Gay found them online. Must get a couple of bottles of Bordeaux. Though they worked fine on Rene Junot plonque.

Started cooking about 3:00, and was done about 6:30. Four pounds of steamed salmon plus a curious turkey breast. It comes in a tight plastic bag, and you pop it straight into the oven with no preparation. After three hours I stuck a thermometer in it and it was done. Unwrap and slice.

Served thirteen people with plenty left over, most of which I'm not supposed to have. A good thing Rusty's here. He can gnaw away at the pecan and peach pies. (His new hip implant is working great; he gets around like a lad of 70.)

Joe

(Here's a picture of the tree after about an hour and a half of unwrapping . . . Gay and Tim standing, and Rusty sitting, playing Santa.)

visions of sugar plums
Whew. Think I've finished all the wrapping, except for one surprise present for Gay, which has to wait until morning. The holly tree I bought as our pagan locus is dwarfed by all the packages underneath it, and Lore's pile hasn't arrived yet.

Plugged in the lights, and our palm tree in the front yard is appropriately gaudy.

We have ten or twelve people coming in the morning for the orgy of gifting. I'm baking fresh cinnamon twists and cooking up some protein for those of us who need it. Sausage and bacon and a dozen hard-cooked eggs. Three liters of champagne cooling down, along with orange and pomegranate juice, for mimosas and pomosas. Breakfast of champagnons.

None of this done without embarrassment, though my feelings are shy of guilt, and shouldn't be. I'm sure if Jesus were around, he would smite the shit out of us, for abusing his birthday. I know we should convert all the largess under that holly tree into a check and send it to Darfur, and comfort one another with the acknowledgement of our own comfort.

But tradition is strong, and family, and both are bulwarks against mortality and a conduit to the fading past. And I do have my charities. Hell, I even put a buck into the Salvation Army bucket on the way into the grocery store this morning.

That group is an interesting exemplar of how complex the act of giving becomes, in the Information Age. Or whatever Age it is now. Google told me that the Salvation Army was, a couple of years ago, the organization with the best through-put of any large charity. Very little of that dollar goes to administration; most of it goes to the needy. So I do give them money.

On the third hand, though, I'm not a Christian, and I know the message that's going out along with my dollar is not something I agree with. But the bread and rice it pays for is more important than my quibbles.

Ah well. Off to the visions of sugar plums.

Joe

evil & pasta & booze
We're obviously agreed that we don't want to simplify the problem, which would lead to familiar attitudes and platitudes (cf. Jimmy Buffett). On the other hand, my charge as a novelist is to communicate, which charge is further narrowed by the fact that I have to make a living this way. So I aim to communicate my thoughts (and yours, with serial numbers filed off) to a certain number of people, who are paying me, at some level, to entertain them. So propositional calculus is probably out, in favor of hot sex and car chases.

So yesterday the temporary tooth the beautiful dentist gave me at MIT inconveniently fell out, but Faculty Practice here at the University of Florida could squeeze me in in 24 hours.

Good-sized dinner party. We did manage to get all 13 around the dining room table, though it was crowded. The meal (chicken with lime juice and garlic) took a surprisingly long time to prepare; a lot of standing over chicken, turning it and checking for done-ness. If I'd done it for four, with boneless chicken breasts (as the recipe called for) it wouldn't have taken a half hour. But I wanted more interesting dark meat as well, and couldn't find any boneless, so sauteeing them took a lot of time and care.

Did a big salad, too, and sliced rutabaga into big thin circles and baked them with paprika and garlic, very nice. Patience Mason brought a wonderful artichoke casserole and the guest of honor, an ex-Gainesville-Zimbabwean, served up an authentic British plum pudding flamed with brandy.

We drank a certain amount, but I was up at five and got some writing done before meeting the dentist at 8:30. Did some last-minute Christmas shopping at Barnes & Noble (books the independents didn't have) and the mall. Found a spectacular sale of Friexnet, the Spanish cava that will pass for champagne, with 1.5-liter double bottles for ten bucks a shot. The local Publix wants $12.99 for a single bottle.

Made a good little Mediterranean meal for the three of us, whole-wheat pasta with fava beans and onions, and we tried to watch a DVD of _The Reader_, which does look good, but our machine's skipping. Look for a head cleaner tomorrow, in the shampoo section.

Joe

Varieties of evil
(Continuing the sff.net discussion of a "science of virtue" . . . )

Dave, one fishhook in your assessment of the problem is the notion that the opposite of virtue is vice. Elie Weisel wisely observed that the opposite of love is not hate; it's indifference. I think the opposite of virtue is passivity.

There is evil in the world, though we can rattle on forever about motivation and ambiguity and eventuality. (Good actions can cause unintended evil; evil actions can precipitate good change.) But give me an example that refutes this commonplace observation: There is an entropic power to evil. If evil is not addressed, it grows. If virtue is not encouraged, it evaporates.

Here's something not entirely unrelated. When we got home we faced a dozen FedEx packages with DVD's of current movies, puffery for the Academy Awards. After dinner enjoying the wholesome Americana of Prairie Home Companion, we sat down to watch _Changeling_, a movie based on historical fact.

It's a horror movie, much more scary than werewolves or vampires. A single mother in LA (in the late 1920's) dotes on her son, and comes back from work to find him missing. After months of frantic searching, the corrupt LAPD says they've found him. She races to the train station to meet the boy . . . and it's not her son.

Hysteria, say the authorities. You're so upset, it's understandable that you would go into denial (though they didn't have that term yet). She points out that ruler marks on the wall prove her son was four inches taller. This boy is circumcised, and her son was not. The police produce a doctor who explains how these things could happen.

She's going mad! The boy's teacher and playmates agree it's some stranger. His dentist says it can't be the same boy, and he'll testify in court to that effect.

She doesn't get to court, though. The police bring her into custody and harass her into a screaming fit, then lace her into a straitjacket and throw her into the loony bin. She finds there are dozens of other women there who've done nothing but piss off the LAPD.

Then the plot takes a wild turn -- a relatively straight cop interrogates a juvenile who claims that he's been kidnapped by a lunatic who has killed (with the boy's frightened assistance) dozens of boys they picked up off the streets of LA. The cops go out to a remote farm and find a shallow grave full of the boys' remains.

A crusading radio preacher manages to get the mother, and others, sprung from the insane asylum. The plot twists and turns and winds up with the horrible truth that her boy was still alive when the police found the ringer, and dropped the search. He was being held captive with another dozen or so boys, who were being killed one at a time with an axe.

The police might not have found him anyhow. But they weren't even looking; they were too busy running gambling dens and prostitution, and even murder-for-hire. Melodramatic, but evidently not far from the historical record.

What's interesting in our context is the two kinds of evil represented. The serial axe murderer is kind of a moral mutant, off the charts. But the police chief and his minions are arguably evil because of a lack of virtue. With every opportunity to do good, they choose otherwise (probably some going along with the bad cops out of fear or timidity).

Just a thought, anyhow. The movie's good, written by Bab 5's J. Michael Straczynski.

Joe

let it snow
Boy, we did get out of town in the nick of time. Early this morning I got a gang email from the Writing Program saying everybody should just go home at noon. Then about eleven, another email from the Institute in general, telling everyone not necessary for emergency maintenance to leave at one. Everybody gets paid; just get home before the snow hits the fan. It started falling about 1:30, and they're expecting a foot or so.

Actually, I sort of wish I was there. The first big snow of the year is a charm. Especially for those of us who don't own cars. The subway doesn't mind the snow, and I love walking in it when it's just sifting down. When it's served up with a howling nor'easter, best stay inside.

(Actually, part of the subway, the Green Line, can be paralyzed by a blizzard. When it melts, part of the line floods.)

Got a good morning of writing done, and then spent about an hour and a half moving acorns. One acorn isn't too much of a job. But my driveway was about three quarters of an inch deep in acorns, call it fifty thousand or so of the little guys. They're like walking on ball bearings, so it's not a job I could put off.

Not even my tree. My neighbor has five big oaks along our property line, and the annual acorn chore is the least of my worries. Limbs more than a foot in diameter hang over my lawn, close enough to be a real danger, at least to my porch and garage, during hurricanes. I really ought to talk to him about being proactive and trimming them. But tree surgeons cost almost as much as human ones, and I would be the one paying.

In Vietnam I could have done the job in a couple of hours, with a few kilos of C4 explosive and some detonation cord. (And some youngster to climb the trees, to be realistic.)

Off to the annual Vets for Peace concert.

Joe

Look! Up in the sky! It's a flake!
Leaving soon into clear skies and above-freezing temperature, as a wicked storm bears down on Boston, twelve inches predicted.

Golly, I hope it's cool enough in Gainesville to build a fire in the fireplace . . .

I got a fascinating invitation yesterday from a project out of the University of Chicago, "A Science of Virtues." It's a complex proposal, but the gist of it is "In what ways might the humanities and the sciences cooperate to develop richer understandings of virtue for modern societies?"

It's eerily close to what my next novel, _Earthbound_, is going to be about. I'd love to be in touch with the scholars working on it from various sciences and humanities angles. But even I don't have the chutzpah to use a novel proposal to try to snag a $50,000 grant. Which is the smallest grant on offer. (Maybe I could travel to Greece and read philosophy for a year.)

If you're interested, google "scienceofvirtues" for the skinny.

Joe

The Old Man and the Competition
Dave, just realized I cross-posted you and missed your post of this morning.

I'm sorry you've lost the ability to play checkers, but don't worry. It's ultimately a "determined" game; if you get to play first and make no mistakes, you will win. Or so I was told by an old guy sucking on a corncob pipe on the porch of a general store.

I wonder about hypothetically studying writing under Hemingway. The one guy who did, Arnold Samuelson, didn't do too well. (His only successful book was about the months he spent with EH, and he never sent it out; his daughter found the ms. after his death.)

Hemingway himself had good teachers, in Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Maddox Ford, and he wound up skewering all of them after they died. Great writer but not a good sport. He did credit the style sheet of the Kansas City Star for teaching him economy and directness. But that was not a person; not a potential rival. He was about the most competitive writer I've ever read about.

Spent the day getting ready to leave tomorrow morning. Swept and vacuumed and scrubbed the floors -- not that big a deal with this small apartment -- and packed and weighed the last boxes for FedEx. Gay had to teach from 9 till 3, but she took over the packing when she got home.

And I had time to spend hours on the novel, though sometimes it was hard to concentrate, with the 18-year-old on the floor below practicing his drums about fifteen minutes out of every hour. Oh well. Hemingway had his sawmill.

Joe

muffs in the buff
One of the people in our sffnet group alerted me to a news story about French nude models going on strike in Paris; the government has told them they can't accept tips, because (at this ecole) they're government employees. In France, it's traditional to pass the "cone," a rolled-up cone of paper, so the artists can throw in a bit of extra money for the minimum-wage models. So they marched nude in front of the building. My response . . .

The Huffington Post story has more pretty pictures, Dennis, at www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/16/paris-life-models-protest_n_151372.html

I'll take the one with pink earmuffs.

One of the male models is so skinny he'd be scary to draw.

Joe

The Day the Plot Stood Still
. . . and Dave Barry knows Carl Hiaasen, and I shook Carl Hiassen's hand at a signing. So the circle is closed. But no! I also shook Richard Nixon's hand, about sixty years ago, and Nixon had sex with his famous dog Checkers. And Dave knows how to play checkers. I rest my case.

We had a nice brunch out in the country Sunday at Mary Zoll's place, very well cooked up and presented. Mary was in Ottone Riccio's poetry workshop with me in the eighties and nineties. Riccio was there (Ricky) with his wife Dolores, and fellow poet Ellen Seigel and her husband Don. Ricky was in good shape, in his mid-eighties, managing prostate cancer well. Some poetry talk, more politics.

We took advantage of the situation to rent a car, and so used it to return bottles and recycle stuff and carry a lot of boxes to the post office.

Last night we joined Junot Diaz for a quick dinner and a bad movie. Junot and I like horrible horror movies, but last night we settled for a horrible sci-fi -- and I use the term accurately -- flick, _The Day the Earth Stood Still_.

I could ask a rhetorical question like How could they spend $80 million screwing up a perfectly good simple, elegant movie? To quote Mike Hammer at the end of _I, the Jury_, "It was easy."

Makes you think of the poster of the Mona Lisa with a smiley face. Klaatu and Gort are no longer satisfied with going after humanity for its essential evil, but for screwing up the planet's ecology. So the big silver globe engenders a bunch of smaller silver globes which mysteriously attract samples of all the life on the planet, and then take off, which leads to an immortal exchange of dialogue. Some DoD scientist exclaims, "They're arks! What comes next?" And Kathy Bates, the Secretary of Defense, intones "The Flood." She should have said "A jillion tiny metal insects!" but that would have given too much away.

Of course Keanu Reeves doesn't have to unleash much acting ability to play Klaatu. He just played his usual affectless self, or perhaps enigmatic. Roger Ebert was funny about this: "He is so solemn, detached and uninvolved he makes Mr. Spock look like Hunter S. Thompson at closing time."

There was no nudity. Unless it happened while I was dozing.

Joe

vampire love stories
Coming soon to a neighborhood near you, or maybe you hope not . . . a guy built his own little Predator with off-the-shelf legal components: a radio-controlled model helicopter, a .45 pistol, and a minicam with broadcast capability. This beta model is kind of loud and not conspicuously accurate, but they're no doubt working on it.

http://gizmodo.com/5107100/rc-helicopter-modded-45-caliber-handgun-will-probably-end-in-disaster

You could miniaturize it. I wonder how much mass one of those relatively cheap and quiet toy helicopters could carry. A single-shot .44 Magnum derringer isn't that heavy, and the camera could be lighter than an iPhone.

You wouldn't need the mass of a gun, either, for a one-time "demonstration." A piece of PVC pipe with a 12-gauge inside diameter. A hearing-aid battery wired across the primer of a buckshot shell.

Or you could sit and contemplate the universe.

It was too cold to comfortably bike yesterday, so I just went as far as Alewife station and parked it. Finished cleaning up my office; readying it for the next occupant. One more trip Monday, to box and mail some books.

Ethan and Jane picked us up for an early dinner at Tryst, always good, and then we went to a very strange play at the local community theater: "Bat Boy: The Musical." It sort of retells "Romeo and Juliet" if Romeo was a tabloid vampire who brings a certain amount of baggage to the relationship. It was terminally silly -- or actually, about ten percent dead serious, not a good mix. But the guy who played the Bat Boy, Matthew Torrance, did a wonderful athletic job, and when he wasn't screeching had a fine high tenor. His body language was disarming, creepy.

Of course if a creepy tabloid vampire comes to your town and tries to run away with the prettiest girl, you can track him to his cave with your little helicopter and a silver bullet.

Joe

no more teachers no more books
I've been out of touch for some days because of end-of-semester stuff. Now I have all the grades recorded and the pizza served, and this morning I worked on my novel, for the first time in a long time.

The pizza party was grievously underattended because of torrential freezing rain. Sixteen of the thirty-six expected. So we gave away a lot of pizza and carried home a lot of beer and wine. (We've had bad weather before, but it's usually heavy snow. I put myself in other people's shoes and say, yeah. I don't mind walking through snow at night, but four inches of rain is a pizza deterrent.)

There's been some interesting journalism over the past couple of days about electronically reading images directly -- more or less -- from the brain. This is one of the best of a half-dozen incarnations of the story I've seen:

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/12/scientists-extract-images-directly-from-brain/

This is really interesting by itself, but the comments that follow it might be even more interesting . . . kind of a Rorschach test about people's attitudes toward science. The first thing I thought was wow, a way for a person with brain damage to communicate with the outside world (thinking about my mother). But it really is a blunt instrument, so far. A lot of people turn it inside out and see mind control, a la Orwell.

I'm confused by something that someone with good modern chemistry or physics might straighten out for me. Scientists found a "hot Jupiter" planet orbiting the star HD 189733b that is exciting because it shows water in its spectrum. But the story (http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/newsblog/36053704.html) says the planet is only a mere three million miles from the star, and its surface temperature is around 2500 degrees F.

Am I missing something here? I thought that the hydrogen and oxygen in water parted company, dissociated, well before 2500 degrees. Who's covering up?

I spent the day today putting the office in shape for its next inhabitant. Always gives me mixed feelings. Glad to be going back south but already missing the MIT ambience.

Joe

never give a drink to a moose
That's an interesting article, David. There was a similar account in the online Sky & Telescope a little while ago. Funny the article says Tycho "discovered" the supernova. It was brighter than Venus and could be seen in broad daylight, so the person who discovered it was whoever got up first in the morning.

It also says his false nose (he had the bridge sliced off in a duel) was gold; I was taught that it was silver. Googling, I find that it was some alloy of gold, silver, and copper; when his body was exhumed in 1901, there was green corrosion from the prosthesis.

I also found that he had a pet moose, which went upstairs during a party and drank so much beer that it got drunk and fell down the stairs, breaking a leg, which eventually led to its death. Hate it when that happens.

So here you are, probably the smartest guy in Europe at the time, and everybody goes "Tycho Brahe? Wasn't he the guy with the drunken moose?"

Dave, your mention of "The Mars Girl" novella reminds me that the trilogy I'm working on now started out life as a modest YA novel. The editor who asked for it didn't accept it, so I made the protagonist a few years older (so she could have a love/sex affair with the ship's pilot without his seeming exploitative) to move it out of category. Then, like Topsy, it just grew.

Went to the "Treasures From Assyria" show at the Museum of Fine Art yesterday before studio. It's very impressive, beautiful and sometimes horrifying in the brutal depiction of war and killing. One beautiful piece that we discussed here a month or so ago is an ivory carving of a lioness killing an African, which is weirdly tender, the lioness holding the man in an affectionate embrace while she nibbles at his throat. The piece was found along with a number of other valuable ones at the bottom of a deep well, by Agatha Christie's husband. Taken out of the muck and cleaned, the ivory began to oxidize and discolor; Agatha came up with a way to stabilize the ivory chemically.

Went there on foot because when I tried to get on the bicycle, the rear wheel was locked up; I think because the brake cable snapped. Hope it's something less severe. Didn't have time to inspect it, and right now it's snowing and I'd better get to grading papers.

The model at studio was beautiful, but a disappointment. She only undressed part way, to black tights and a bra, which looked vaguely ridiculous; it would have been better had she posed in regular clothes. No explanation offered, but Patrick knew she had been ill -- she didn't show up on time, and he called her -- so perhaps she didn't want to take a chill.

She seemed dispirited and bored, as well, which doesn't help. The only picture I have that's vaguely worth showing is a quick ink-and-wash sketch where I ignored her clothes and just drew what I thought she looked like. It was a good pose, leaning back with feet at right angles.

Ah well. In two weeks I'll be back in the studio in Gainesville, and the model will be warm like the rest of us.

Joe

Back in Cambridge
The varied discussion [in sff.net] of the most important date in history makes you wonder about the huge cluster of dates that would have about 6.74 billion points -- each person's choice -- with significant concentrations around obvious anniversaries like the birth and death of religious figures, wars, discoveries. But the entire set of points is itself a datum, which has existed as a discrete datum for every day since people were able to conceive of the notion, "the most important day." The ebb and flow of this diagram over the centuries would be a significant mapping of an aspect of the human spirit.

We didn't do much museum-going in New York, but one freebie I highly recommend to the bookish crowd is the large exhibit in the New York Public Library about the Yaddo colony of writers and artists. A nice place to spend a couple of hours time-tripping. No obvious sf connection, except obliquely, like Allan Gurganus (_Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All_), a classmate of mine at Iowa who has written some very good fantasy short stories.

We took a calorie-laden walking tour of Chinatown, highly recommended. All sorts of lore about Tong wars and dim sum, and the best Portuguese cream custard in the world. Ended up at the fancy TenRen tea emporium, where I bought enough loose tea to get a "free" calendar, full of Chinese dates.

Met my agent Ralph Vicinanza at a tony little restaurant that I think was called the Cook's Shop. Caught up on gossip and did a little business. I managed to break a bicuspid whilst eating soft fish. It was obviously ready to go south, and didn't hurt, but did leave a conspicuous hole. Gay made me an emergency appointment at MIT Dentistry, which I went to yesterday. It will eventually need a root canal, post, and crown, but not until I get back to Florida. A very nice and painless dentist here built a temporary little tooth in the hole. She had the most beautiful eyes, over her mask, carefully made up with long lashes. A tool of the trade, I suppose.

Winding up here. Better get off to school and grade some papers. Also have a short practicum about Dreamweaver 8 at noon. I'm sure that all will be made clear, and I'll be able to whip my website back into shape.

Joe

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