Joe's Place

New Yawk
Uneventful walk to the T station, Red Line to South Station, train to New York.

We met Phil Anderson and Judith at the Walter Kerr theater, a small Broadway venue, to see a fascinating rendition of Chekhov's _The Seagull_. A long and complex play about art and love, with little action and a lot of talk, it was a dismal failure when it first appeared -- the lead actress was so upset by the audience's hostility that she lost her voice! -- and it wasn't until Stanilavski staged it later that it became a critical success. (Which success led Chekhov to write _Uncle Vanya_, and cement his reputation.) The play is a comedy with ghastly overtones and a strong _Hamlet_ understory. If you're a writer or any kind of artist, there are scenes that will make your hair stand on end, between the young avante-gard writer Konstantin and the comfortable middlebrow storyteller Trigorin. Suicidal depression and unexamined self-satisfaction.

From there we went to a birthday party for Claudia Dreifus, up by Central Park West, whose guest of honor was Andrew Hacker, political scientist and (according to Wiki) "public intellectual." An engaging and brilliant old man. The party was full of people I should have recognized. Hacker took off his shoes and stood on a couch to lead a toast to Obama and a new hopefulness in American politics. A good moment. (The connection with Dreifus is that they're collaborating on a book on American higher education.)

From there we ambled over to the Cafe des Artistes, a tony upscale joint I described last month, with luscious 1930's nude murals on all the walls. I had sturgeon schnitzel, which you don't get just everywhere. Absolutely great. The conversation was sparkling and sardonic, as always with Phil and Judith. A super night out.

Joe

off to the mill & swill
Friday we went to an awards ceremony where our friend Jag Patel got an MIT Excellence Award for her work in comprehensive surveys of MIT personnel. She got a plaque and a check, about $2000 more than I've ever gotten for a Hugo Award. Nice munchies and short speeches, a good combination.

Then we went over to see the new digs at Google, which moved about a block to get some breathing space. Kathy Sternat gave us the Cook's Tour. Still looks like one of the best places in the world to work. Lots of latitude for self-expression. Snacks and a play room. Bring Your Dog to Work Day, which must be interesting. It being Friday afternoon, most people had knocked off work early. There was a champagne and cake party going on for new employees.

Her Andrew met us downstairs and we walked about ten yards to Legal Seafood, for good simple fish and wine.

Yesterday it was too cold and windy for me to bike to studio -- nine degrees with wind chill factor -- so we walked to the T and subwayed in. We got to the Museum of Fine Arts right after it opened and took a turn around a new exhibit of portrait and figure photography, very good. Then we met Glen McGlenn and Jody, friends from the net, at the cafe for lunch. A pleasant dawdle. Then they all went off to look at Egyptian stuff while I went to studio.

Model was Laura (Laurel?), same as last week, very good. Again I found that my short-pose drawings were better than the two-hour one, overworked. I went downstairs to get coffee and when I came back up, the place was full of Koreans -- a camera crew that was doing a special on the Museum of Fine Arts. So they swarmed around taking pictures of everything, while Patrick, our fearless leader, kept up a commentary. Laura took a new pose for background purposes. I did a ninety-second splash sketch, a broad wash and then a few lines of ink, that probably was the best picture of the day.

Home to fix a simple veggie dinner and pack for New York. Leaving in an hour, 7:00. May see some of you at the Mill 'n' Swill. (The SFWA Editor/Author reception.)

Joe

Iowa City - books but no radio
(Jim Ewell, on sff.net, sent along an article about Iowa City, my alma mater, being designated an official Literary City by UNESCO -- the only such place in the U.S.)

Thanks for sending that along, Jim. Interesting article -- Iowa City gets international recognition for its literary importance just as the local radio station dumps the literary readings program.

That was a great program, originating at one of the country's great book stores, Prairie Lights. They used to give readers fifty dollars' worth of books. I asked the owner, Paul Ingram, to select them for me, since he was a professional book person. This was 1991, and _Questions About Angels_ had just come out. So I learned about Billy Collins's poetry before most people had heard of him. Paul also selected _The English Patient_, so I read that fascinating book before the movie came out.

(A pleasant memory . . . we went on a Caribbean cruise right after, so I read _The English Patient_ pedaling on the stationary bicycle and lying out in the shade on the deck with weird rum drinks. All the horror and pain in that book set against an idyllic background.)

I wasn't in the International Writers Workshop, Jim; just the ordinary Writers Porkchop. It really changed my life, though. I wouldn't be a professor now without that credential. Life might be simpler, or more complicated.

Off to studio now. ("I see naked people.") A couple of friends are meeting us at the Museum of Fine Arts cafe, and off to see some pictures before I go across the street to make some.

Joe

signing in Cambridge today
Signing today at Pandemonium Books, with Jeff Carver and Chris Howard.

Pandemonium Books and Games
 4 Pleasant Street 
Cambridge, MA 02139

That's off Mass Ave in Central Square. They told me 6:30, but the website says 7. I'll be there at 6:30. Come early and bring me a beer . . .

Joe

shiver me embers
Sort of lazed around yesterday after the procedure, napping and reading. Then we got an invitation to a fixed-price Italian meal at a fancy joint in the North End, $35 for four good courses. Not too easy to get to; more than two hours on public transportation and shank's mare, but I thought I was up to it. So we set out.

Before we got to the bus stop (more than a half mile, mostly uphill), I was starting to have second thoughts, and then a third thought: we have a really nice Italian restaurant at the top of the hill, which would cost less than $35. And with the money we saved, we could go to the movies across the street. So Gay humored me, and that's what we did.

I had a small but luscious dish of fresh lasagna filled with artichoke and cheese, with a glass of good Chianti. Went to the movie first, actually; there was a showing just five minutes after we got there. The curious semi-sf movie _City of Ember_.

As science fiction it's ludicrous, as error-riddled as _Waterworld_, but perhaps it doesn't ask to be anything other than a slightly futuristic fairy tale. The last remnants of the human race are packed away in a subterranean village for two hundred years, after which it will presumably be safe on the surface, though the few mutated animals that make it down there indicate things are not too rosy up above. Like a man-eating mole the size of a Hummer.

The sets are cheesy and charming. The population stumbles around in clueless acceptance of a "things couldn't be better" propaganda line, as their world crumbles into entropic ruin. They still have whole closets full of canned goods with aged labels. Let's see, two hundred people times two hundred and some years. There appears to be no memory or mythology about the surface, except a taboo against going there.

Bill Murray does a pretty good broad-stroke impression of a bloated Mayor, stuffing himself on illicit canned food from a private stash, and Martin Landau has a lot of fun as a crazed old man who means well. A lot of the minor parts are acted with surprising intensity, as if they had wandered in from some other script.

The story is weirdly unbalanced. After a two-minute introductory infodump, it does a pretty good job of "show-don't-tell," but there's an awful lot of showing. Then the last ten minutes are as frantic as a _Bullit_ car-chase scene, and then a quick cut to the surface of an Earth that seems free of menacing mutants.

Has anybody read the book? I suspect it's better.

Joe

up yer ass with a tube o' glass (fibers!)
As is the way of such things, Mike, the leftover goat stew was even better than the original article. It was a smart deal; found the meat in a little butcher shop, frozen, for $3.99 a pound, with only a few bones. Cooked it forever with tomatoes and wine, then added some carrots and potatoes, and oregano and lemon juice to make it Greek. We got eight healthy servings from $8 worth of meat.

Dave, I left too early this morning to heed your advice. I think I did all right with the routine inspection, though; I watched every inch of it (being only lightly sedated) on the monitor, and there was nothing obviously out of the ordinary. I have seen a couple of polyps before, and watched the doc zap them.

It's really less bother than a trip to the dentist, if marginally more dangerous. The first old guy who gave me one said he'd done more than ten thousand with only one fatality, and that was on a patient who already was dying of advanced colon cancer. It's uncommon enough that I can't find a death rate on Google.

They gave me a most welcome blueberry muffin for being a good boy. Don't have to go again for five years. Called for a cab to take us back, but after waiting fifteen minutes we just hopped on the trolley and went downtown a ways. Got off at a new stop, for the heck of it, and found a nice Japanese place, Fin's, where I had the best bento box ever, sea bass. A day of starvation may have helped.

Then we took the T to the end of the line and I walked the mile home with no problem.

Fans of Obama, or O'Bama, ought to listen to the song that proves he's Irish --

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EADUQWKoVek

Joe

good day's work
Yesterday I worked on STARBOUND and then went off to studio. I carried along the small manuscript notebook (a paperback Moleskine) with the short story I'm working on, and wrote on that after lunch in the museum cafeteria. Then spent about twenty minutes in a room full of colonial American art. Then had a glass of wine at the museum café and wrote another page.

The colonial portraiture was interesting stuff that I'd never looked at closely before. Mostly John Singleton Copley, a prolific portrait painter. His "Paul Revere" is the iconic representation of the man; he also has good paintings of Hancock, Adams, and so forth. About half of the paintings are women, mostly wives of the famous and rich, and the inescapable observation is that they look like real women, where the men look like famous men sitting for a picture, stiff and important. The women have faces full of humor, or caution, or design, and if you changed their hairstyle and clothing they would look perfectly modern. I suppose if you changed the men's clothing and hairstyle they would look like modern politicians.

Copley's most famous painting is the horrific "Watson and the Shark," which exists in several versions. The one here is the largest, but not the original, which is in the National Gallery. The painting depicts an actual incident, when an English boy who was swimming in Havana's harbor was attacked by a shark, and nearly killed before a boatload of sailors could spear the shark and rescue him. The boy Brook Watson lost a leg but recovered, and eventually became Lord Mayor of London, and commissioned the painting. It was quite a sensation in London, and made Copley's European reputation. (Watson eventually had a coat of arms that featured his grisly severed leg.)

The model for studio was very good, an industrial artist named Laura. About forty, good body, very stable. She posed for a five-minute, then a ten-minute, and then two and a half hours in one pose -- standing -- with only three breaks. That's a pro. I did one painting, mixed watercolor and gouache, that I think is one of the best I've ever done. Also a five-minute sketch of the same pose for my little Moleskine travel watercolor journal.

I'll put a picture of the mixed-media large one in Live Journal. Also one of the two Moleskine journals, writing and painting.

Home for a quick meal -- leftover goat stew, much better than that sounds -- and Gay and I walked up to the theater to see the Cohn brothers' goofy "Burn After Reading," a spy spoof with a dark thread or two. Frances McDormand was perfect, as usual, paired well with George Clooney and an odd incarnation of Brad Pitt as a clueless physical fitness instructor.

Went out for a longish bike ride this morning. Will be confined at home later, preparing for a colonoscopy tomorrow. Inconvenient but not scary anymore.

Joe

extra-special planets
We'll be there, Keith. (At Demicon, in Des Moines next May.) In fact, I'll be guest of honor.

Geoff, if the press release had been from MIT, I'd suspect a world-class hack. Especially with the John W. Campbell name SiOnyx. But Harvard would never do anything like that.

Pretty big couple of days for science! I hope everybody has seen the pictures of the extrasolar planets, imaged by Hubble and the Keck/Gemini in Hawaii. The Hubble planet is orbiting Fomalhaut, a nearby star beloved of science fiction writers. The WSJ presentation is at http://blogs.livemint.com/blogs/labrats/archive/2008/11/14/extrasolar-planets-don-t-speculate-see-them.aspx.

I hadn't expected to see an image like that for many years to come.

Just finished the book TRUE ENOUGH, by Salon.com writer Farhad Manjoo. A fascinating look at the manipulation and re-definition of truth in a media-saturated age. There's some repetition of basic arguments, but they bear repeating.

Something that seems obvious in retrospect: the sheer volume of data available about the 9/11 attacks fueled the avalanche of conspiracy theories. If you have millions of images to study, you can select evidence for anything.

His analysis of how the Swift Boat attack worked is worth the price of the book, which just came out in paperback. (I checked it out of the MIT library, but will buy a copy for my shelf.)

Joe

Nazi weather control
Mike, if you do "look it up," it's hard to find a citation that doesn't use the word "invasion" when describing Hitler's peaceful occupation of Czechoslovakia. It wasn't an invasion like, zum Beispiel, the American invasions of Iraq, since you just had hordes of goose-stepping soldiers marching across the border, without a lot of messy gunfire. "Surrender" probably describes it more accurately, but it was sort of like a thug walks up to you and pulls a gun, and you look around and all your pals have disappeared. If Hitler didn't have to "invade" the country, it was because England and France and their other soi-disant allies had handed them over.

It's worth a dime to know that the day before Hitler's representatives walked across the border, the United States was hit by a hurricane that was described as the worst natural disaster ever to occur in the Western Hemisphere. Sort of took over the front pages in America. Coincidence? Hah! Nazi weather control at its most blatant.

Speaking of "winds of change," Dennis, we're going to have to come up with a new cliché when talking about wind power. Seventeen thousand attendees at a wind power conference!

And then yesterday, on the solar-power front, we got the amazing news release from Harvard -- roughing up silicon with femtolasers can greatly increase the photosensitivity of solar cells, and their quietly assembled SiOnyx outfit is gearing up to take advantage of it. (My personal stake in that one is on a much smaller scale -- the possibility of increasing the light-gathering capacity of small telescopes by a couple of orders of magnitude.)

And about those sleazy liberal fascists . . . Michael Mann's review of Goldberg's book; of his linking American liberals to fascism, had this central observation: "The only thing these links prove is that fascism contained elements that were in the mainstream of 20th-century politics. Following Goldberg's logic, I could rewrite this book and berate American liberals not for being closet fascists but for being closet conservatives or closet Christian Democrats. But that would puzzle Americans, not shock them. Shock, it seems, sells books."

Truthiness does, too.

I had a less than earth-shaking book-signing and reading at the MIT Coop yesterday. Rain and dark and no advertising. A couple of friends and one of my students showed up (and she was already getting an A), and only five or six strangers, but they all bought hardcovers.

If I work hard the rest of today, I might be able to clear up the weekend for my own writing. Beginning the transition back into real life.

Joe

The Big Pair of Eyes
Fear not, Neale. The LBT -- Large Binocular Telescope -- in Arizona will be outperforming the Hubble with its pair of 27.6-foot mirrors. In terms of resolving power, it will deliver images ten times sharper than the old girl, even operating in the Earth's atmosphere. The 10-meter Kecks and Gran Canarias aren't exactly spyglasses either.

Bob, my jaw dropped at that revelation. On the final figuring of the 200" Hale, they would rub a few inches with the optician's thumb, removing a few molecules here and there. Then wait for hours while the huge disk returned to thermal equilibrium after being exposed to the human's body heat. Holy Galileo!

Last night we had a nice dinner with Ethan at the somewhat upscale restaurant Tryst. My blood sugar numbers have been good, so I treated myself to half a plate of pasta. Then we went to his house to watch the _Nova_ show "Aliens From Earth," about the "hobbit" hominids that may have evolved separately on the Indonesian island Flores, isolated from H. sapiens. Ethan co-wrote it, co-adapted it. It's based on an Australian program.

It seemed very even-handed. There's a basic disagreement as to whether the skeletons unearthed do belong to a separate species, or to regular humans suffering from dwarfism, and they didn't soft-pedal that. They also gave fair share to the scientists who feel that the creatures didn't have the brain volume (around 400 cc.) necessary for complex behavior like tool-using and organized hunting, both of them activities linked to the little guys. But overall, the show agrees with the "separate species" interpretation.

I woke up around 2:15, after about three hours' sleep, and stayed wide awake for some reason. Finally I got up and read the last couple of chapters of _Duma Key_. There are a lot of ghosts and goblins toward the end, but the very end is quiet, understated. Not a bad job. The first hundred pages, as I said here before, are very good, and I think the next five hundred would be a treat for a horror fan. I'm not one, really, but I thought the story ticked along quite well anyhow, with lots of interesting observations about painting and pain, gaining and losing. He's a good solid writer who's been through a lot, and puts it down honestly.

Like most of his books, it's way too long for my taste. But I'm glad I read it.

Joe

The Big Eye
(One of the respondents in sff.net did not like Obama's election, and quoted Churchill on Hitler's invasion of Czechoslavakia -- "We are in the midst of a first-class disaster." )

Yeah, I can see the similarity between Obama's election and Hitler invading Czechoslovakia. After all, Hitler was a black candidate who stole the election from a white one by displaying a disgustingly even temper and laughably broad knowledge of current affairs and historical perspective.

Representative Paul Broun (R-GA) is comparing Obama to Hitler, and also Marx, two guys who always saw eye to eye. He thinks that Obama wants to ban gun ownership while building a national security force, though the logic there is not clear.

My own greatest fear is that he's going to take all our guns away and give them to a secret homosexual army. All big black guys with gangsta tats, who will come looking for guys like me. Easy to find, cowering in gunless suburbia.

We had a nice long bike ride yesterday, through glowing leaves. Sunny and cold. Up to Lexington for a good Indian lunch, chunks of tandoori chicken in hot chili sauce. Went shopping at the big grocery there, then the long coast downhill.

Watched a fascinating biopic of George Ellery Hale, who built the world's largest telescope four times, ending with the universe-changing 200-inch on Mount Palomar. He was unbelievably energetic and only slightly insane. An MIT grad (1891), he was an active amateur astronomer all his life, as well as a professional one. (He is credited with discovering carbon in the solar spectrum.)

The working name of the 200-inch was the Big Eye, a charming American name. They changed it to the Hale Telescope after Hale died.

Joe

Mayflower
We had a final breakfast at the B&B, a sinful feast of French toast with roasted Macadamia nuts and maple syrup, and then made our leisurely way to Boston. Stopped at Plymouth and walked through the replica of the _Mayflower_. A small ship for such a long voyage with so many people -- 102 passengers and about thirty crew members. (There's a crowded cutaway drawing at www.mayflowersteps.co.uk/mayflower/cut-away-mayflower-ship.jpg)

The replica was built in England and sailed to Plymouth without any power other than wind, and without a modern escort, in 1957. A display has two of the pages from the captain's log displayed; he notes that they spied a new comet in the northwest. That gave me a little chill of remembrance; it would have been Comet Arend-Roland, which thirteen-year-old me looked at through my newly purchased (huge for the time) eight-inch reflector.

Brandy and Christina let us off at Braintree, the southern terminus of the Red Line, and we rode all the way to the northern terminus Alewife -- we've been using it since 1983, and this is the first time we've done the whole thing. Wheeled our bags over to the Summer Shack restaurant for an early fish dinner, and then trundled the mile home in gorgeous weather.

Looks like good biking out there, after a damp dawn. Stack of papers to grade, but will do some miles on the Minuteman Trail first.

Joe

last day on the Cape
Yesterday we had a sumptuous breakfast at the B&B -- which is the Inn at Sandwich Center, a 250-year-old Colonial house that's on the Registry of Historic Places, highly recommended for comfort and history. Worked a bit and then went with Jim off to Seafood Sam's, a locally admired seafood shack on the Cape Cod Canal. I had a good crab salad and a glass of wine for $3.65, probably the least I'll ever pay outside of the MIT campus. (The Muddy Charles Pub still has a $3 glass.)

Afterwards we walked along the canal to the sea jetty, and then a mile or two on inland. It's supposedly the longest canal in the world that doesn't have locks, and also the widest. Lots of interesting seabirds, and also birds of a mammalian sort, jogging. Jim and Brandy and I were walking out front when a pretty girl bounced by saying "Hi, professor!" -- and all of us realized we hadn't seen her face yet. But she was one of Jim's students, not an interloper from MIT or the University of Florida.

We logged 10,000 steps by pedometer and came back to the inn to rest a bit. Then a bit of a drive off to ___, a seafood restaurant that was a fixture at ____ until it burned down last year. Now rebuilt twice as large. Good food but not spectacular. I had a spicy fish piccata that could have been spicier, for me.

Then on to the First Encounter Meeting House in Eastham, a Unitarian coffee house that was sponsoring Peggy Seeger, Pete Seeger's wife. We'd seen her at MIT a couple of years ago, and knew she was a fine performer. She didn't disappoint, doing two sets of traditional folk mixed with songs of her own composition, some of them jazz and blues as well as folk. A strong voice for a woman of 73, and when she sang the blues she sounded a third her age, husky and intimate. She played an impressive array of instruments -- guitar, banjo, concertina, autoharp, and piano -- with impressive strength and agility.

Long drive home through the rain, but worth it.

joe

butterscotch gamma rays
We're staying in a pleasant B&B for the weekend in Sandwich, MA, in Cape Cod. Across from the Glass Museum, which we will investigate today. Brandy's brother Jim, a gentle Buddhist and overworked journalism professor, has taken the weekend off to join us.

Yesterday we took a hike to a remarkable boardwalk about a mile away. It goes over perhaps a half-mile of dunes, to the sea. It was all very New England, foggy and still with a cold mist in the salt air. Had a cup of coffee to warm up and then returned to the B&B for wine and cheese and chat.

For dinner we went out about ten miles -- myself enjoying a swift ride in Jim's sporty Miata -- to a Thai place called Stir Crazy. I had a good concoction of tofu and vegetables. Then back to the B&B, where our hosts provided brandy and port and fresh cookies.

I note in the morning's emails that the new _Nature_ has an article about scientists thinking they have a handle on dark matter, finally. Hoping to back up gamma-ray satellite observations with the CERN particle manufacture. The logic isn't clear to me . . . evidently there are super-massive thingies in a halo around the center of the Galaxy that make up more than four fifths of the galaxy's mass, but are only detectable by one kind of gamma ray, which reveals its presence only to some new satellite sensor. I would have thought a gamma ray was a gamma ray. But maybe they come in butterscotch and strawberry now.

Joe

Billions for Hollywood but not one cent for Peoria
I guess it's worth reminding ourselves that what we Americans call liberal would be considered centrist in Britain and most of Europe. And also that politics isn't economics; a person can be politically conservative and socially liberal (though there is the problem of where the money for liberal programs is going to come from).

Ever since the old GEnie days, there has been a vocal minority of confrontational conservatives on the net, or confrontational people who happen to be conservative in politics, though it may be that I'm less sensitive to bullying from the left.

Yesterday we took Brandy and Christina in on the T to have lobster rolls at Legal Seafood in Cambridge, and then we went over to Harvard, to see the glass flowers in the Natural History Museum. Thousands of blown-glass flowers that were made as botanical teaching aids from the 1880's to the thirties, and are now objects of art. Delicate and impressively realistic. Also saw a wonderful collection of old scientific instruments and several rooms full of Aztec and Mayan public art, some of it gruesome.

I got us pretty lost -- I'm not familiar with the Harvard campus, except for the few routes I use getting through Cambridge -- but we did eventually find Harvard Square. Raining too hard for busker street entertainment, so I led us to John Harvard's pub, one of my favorite watering holes, and we spent a few hours there sampling ales (they make their own) and having dinner. Then home to relax with some TV and such, while I did a little schoolwork.

One interesting thing . . . Oprah featured the other guy's THE FOREVER WAR, which undoubtedly sold a good number of his books, but I got some fallout from it myself -- including a long and detailed blog saying Joe Haldeman's Back Catalog Could Make Hollywood Billions (http://io9.com/5062996/joe-haldemans-back-catalog-could-make-hollywood-billions) -- where Alex Carnevale looks at seven or eight of my books and evaluates their cinematic potential. Expecting calls from H'wood any time now.

Joe

two ideas at once
Finding reasonable and reliable news is a complex business, that always has an element of self-referential selection. Every now and then I'll buy a Boston Herald or listen to Rush et al., to see what the other side is telling itself, but I do have to remind myself that my self-selected Globe and Jon Stewart and Jim Lehrer are also selling a bill of goods. It happens to be the party line that I'm sympathetic with, but that doesn't make it objectively right; it just makes it comfortable.

I'm reading as my subway book Farhad Manjoo's uncomfortable argument _True Enough_, with the scary subtitle "Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society." Part of it is about the "Big Lie" strategies of the cynical manipulators like the Swift-Boaters, but part of it is also about being careful about lying to yourself. Buying into hopeful half-truth. Applying different standards to arguments if they make you feel good. It's especially useful in this politicized season.

More than fifty million people voted for John McCain, and few of them are racists or warmongers. They're people I pass on the street -- but they aren't the people I hang out with, so in a fundamental social way they don't exist for me. They probably are aware that more than sixty million people voted for "that man," but their social connections are similarly slanted, so it isn't Joe and Dave who cast those ballots. It's some amorphous "liberal." As they are the faceless "conservative" to me. I think we all have to work our way out of this comfortable mental laziness, before we can work together to fix the things that we all agree need fixing. (The ones we don't agree on, well, that's another story, and welcome to the ballot box.)

One of the examples Manjoo describes is a simple experiment, asking college-age people "Which city is larger, San Diego or San Antonio?" They asked a bunch of Germans and they all answered correctly, San Diego. Only two thirds of American students got it right. The Germans answered with the only name they recognized, of course. The Americans tried to figure it out (some of them no doubt assuming it was a trick question).

Of course the larger problem is separating truth from truthiness, and realizing that most important social questions aren't amenable to true/false. I love Scott Fitzgerald's observation that the sign of a mature intelligence is being able to hold two competing ideas in your mind at the same time. Political maturity is being able to meet the other side part way, without either of you sacrificing ideals.

I'm not a liberal myself. In a pure sense I'm an anarchist, because I think that both government and politics are atavistic institutions that have to be replaced before they destroy us all. I don't know what will replace them, but I suspect it will be something as unexciting as "management." I don't think we'll have a name for it until we look around and realize that our presidents and prime ministers are sentimental relics, like kings and princes.

Joe

we won
Anyone who reads this column with any regularity knows that I'm somewhere between agnostic and atheist on the subject of patriotism. I'm an American by accident of birth, and sometimes that feels like a happy accident, but more often it's something I have to apologize for. We started out pretty well, with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but in recent years we have strayed from that clear path more often than we've followed it.

So let me say it this one time in my life: I'm proud to be an American.

I'm even sort of proud to be a white American. Because it did take millions of white Americans to stand in line for hours to push the lever, check the box, or punch the screen that put a black man in charge of our future. It's something I hoped for, but until recently did not expect to happen in my lifetime. It doesn't undo the Civil War or the injustice of the "peculiar institution" that still haunts every aspect of my state, Florida, but it's a big step, a giant step.

I don't know how I would feel this morning if I were black. I think I would feel pride, and a sense of relief, and maybe even gratitude for my white brothers and sisters who stepped up to the line and made their choice.

"Change has come to America," Obama said simply last night, and he followed that with a list of the burdens and challenges he has inherited. I hope America will stand behind him, and make that change real and deep.

Joe

tuff
The whole story is even more harrowing. The British troops had seen what they thought was evidence that the colonials had scalped and murdered a wounded soldier, and were not well disposed toward the enemy. They're retreating and this octogenarian whack-job steps out in front of them with an ancient flintlock and two dueling pistols, and manages to kill three of them at practically point-blank range. The first shot in return was from a blunderbuss, which took off half of Whittemore's face. Then he was shot a couple more times and got a butt-stroke (not as gentle as that sounds) to the head. He was left for dead, and as the enemy column passed by, a bunch of them poked him with bayonets, just for fun.

Afterward, the colonials were astounded to find that he was still alive. The doctor was in favor of sparing him the pain of treatment; just let him pass. But at the townspeople's urging (the old buzzard was already a folk hero) he did what he could, and the rest is history.

Off to Montreal, for the World Fantasy Con. See some of you there?

Joe

one tough dude
I had to take a picture of this memorial stone that's in Arlington's little city park. I mean, you may have tough dudes in your town, but they probably couldn't take down Sam Whittemore! If you can't read the engraving, it says

NEAR THIS SPOT

SAMUEL WHITTEMORE,

THEN 80 YEARS OLD,

KILLED THREE BRITISH SOLDIERS,

APRIL 19 1775,

HE WAS SHOT BAYONETTED

BEATEN AND LEFT FOR DEAD

BUT RECOVERED AND LIVED

TO BE 98 YEARS OF AGE.

Joe

collect books and eat flaming laser death
Thanks for the slime-y advice, Dennis. I'll give it a try. If it makes this bike a little harder to pedal, shrug. I want to maximize exercise on it, anyhow.

Dave, Rusty's house was broken into years ago, and the brigands took stuff like an old portable TV and some kitchen appliances. They didn't bother with the priceless signed first editions, the complete run of Weird Tales, the original oil for the first edition of _The Shadow_. So you could argue that at that level, it's a relatively safe place to put your money. (I wonder how many people right now are moaning over putting money into real estate rather than first editions and art.)

I don't collect signed books -- don't know many writers who do -- but I do have one that's beyond price for me, a beat-up hardback of STARSHIP TROOPERS that my brother took to have autographed for me when Heinlein gave his famous speech at the Naval Academy. Beyond price for me, but would probably fetch a certain amount from collectors, too.

Somewhere in my bales upon bales of correspondence I have a holograph letter from Professor Tolkein; I wrote him about enjoying _The Hobbit_ in Vietnam. He wrote back soldier-to-soldier.

Well, have to get on the T and go downtown to Suffolk University, to talk to an SF class on THE FOREVER WAR. It's a freshman seminar called "Eat Flaming Laser Death: War and Apocalypse in Science Fiction." Should be fun.

Joe

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