Friends

Username:	Password:
Forgot your password?	Remember Me

Words fail me
Well, not so much for this first one but I have no appropriate comments for the second one.

Pointed out to me by the Cardamom Addict.

LyricsJournal: Because I just today realized that I know a song about both a Wabbit and a Coyote
By the always-amazing

s00j:

Trickster came a'calling To find a totem here
To teach the foolish heart of man
Without installing fear.
Many came and many went And still the Trickster paused;
Bear and Cat and Tiger tried but had too many claws.
Dog and Wolf though wise indeed
Had teeth t'were quite a fright
And Owl with his tawny eyes could only see at night.
"No," the Trickster said at last
"Teachers, I see many.
But My way is full of laughter and in you I see not any."

But beneath the tree where Eagle sat
Coyote told the tale
of silly hares cavorting
In the old country of Wales.
Raven stared unto the sun
And Crow sang awful songs
And Rabbit sat a'listening
With ears so wondrous long.

"Aha!" The Trickster danced a dance
Of mirth and vict'ry sweet.
He leapt with joy and swooped a swoop
And landed at their feet.
"Of all here now," the Trickster said
"You are the very Beasts!"
And Rabbit said, "I'm sorry sir
But of all, we are the least."

The Trickster smiled and raised a hand
And spoke: "I have a plan
The four of you shall help me
To teach the heart of Man.
Raven with your love of light
The Sun you'll steal and soon.
For the gift of warmth I give to man
To be the greatest boon.
And Crow, you silly creature
Who sings without a voice,
Teach man `bout pride and helping
You really have no choice.
Coyote my friend, together we'll spin
Many a tale at night,
And show man by our naughtiness
What really should be right."

At last He turned to Rabbit
With a twinkle in his eye
"You'll be my favorite creature
And here's the reason why:
Your eyes are bright, your feet are swift
Your ears hear round the bend
But your very simple humbleness
Will steal the heart of men.
Together we shall thwart the pains
The gods do throw to earth
And turn aside their fiery darts
With merriment and mirth.
And when time comes that men forget
The lessons animals render
T'will be the humble rabbit
That mankind will remember."

And round the Trickster the animals thronged
The birds and all the beasts
And humbly bowed to the king they found,
who thought himself "the least."

words by S. J. Tucker and Trudy Herring
music by S. J. Tucker, based on traditional themes

I lived!
And, I think, revisions done. After a couple of long stern grovels through the prose, and some making the plot make sense, it's become a story I am actually quite proud of.

...and now I get to have a beer and watch the telly.

P.S. still in love with the new computer. I'm reasonably certain it makes me write better. Like new sneakers make you run better, you know? You know!

...YOU DON'T KNOW? Oh, I'm sorry.

Current Mood: stick a fork in me

More ReformaTory PR
This was also printed on the cheap in black and white and looks more like something the tinfoil hat brigade might have come up with to warn the populace about the terrible menace of CHUD. The topic in this one is the shadowy menace of YOUTH CRIME (as represented by a masked kid in a hoodie) and that the ReformaTories are dealing with the issue.

I've avoided it for as long as I can. I have the revision notes, both mine and John's, for "The Red in the Sky is Our Blood," and today is devoted to making it not suck. Well, what's left of today, anyway. I successfully frittered the morning away on exercise and making a pot of supa improvisata (no, that's not supposed to be real Italian).

Now I have to fix this story.

And the first thing I have to do is find a first line that would not get it rejected by every self-respecting magazine editor in North America.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Music: Fresh Air

Yours towards a greater transparency in publishing...
As all y'all know, one of the things--perhaps the primary thing--I try to do with this blog is demystify the ~~sausage~~ publishing industry.

Well, Michael Cisco is talking openly now about some problems he's been having with Prime Books. And I'm here to publicly back him up: I have now heard from four or five friends and at least three acquaintances that Prime doesn't pay, doesn't pay on time, or doesn't pay without regular dunning letters.

Ben Peek shares his own stories of deals with Prime here.

Leah Bobet comments on the issue.

Now, what I'm saying here is not "Don't buy Prime Books." They publish any number of amazing authors--Ben Peek, and Michael Cisco, obviously. Sarah Monette. Ekaterina Sedia. The list goes on.

What I'm saying is, it might behoove Prime Books to conduct their business in a professional manner. And until they do--it's damned courageous of Cisco to publicly identify the problem, for the benefit of other authors who may be entertaining an offer from this company.

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Music: Taj Mahal - She Caught The Katy (and left me a mule to ride)

[fourth-wall-locked] Re: My previous post
To all my concerned friends who don't know who

trollcatz,

0metotchtli and

cvillette are: please don't worry about my previous post. All three of these people are completely fictional, characters from the fine and fabulous immersive fiction project known as Shadow Unit (authored by Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette). These three characters have fully interactive LJs, and with LJs come LJ drama.
The post is labeled "filtered," but isn't, and I know it. It's in keeping with the form of the characters' LJs, and for the same reasons: many of the people who read Shadow Unit don't have LJs of their own, so they can't read locked posts. My little drama with

cvillette is currently serving as entertainment for some great folks out there.
And to everyone who's concerned about me, personally, well, I promise you, I'm better than OK with the whole thing, I'm positively gleeful about it. It's great fun, an RPG in which I am playing myself. So don't worry, OK?

[filtered]Please?

trollcatz and

0metotchtli:
I know, you guys are his friends first and foremost, and your loyalties are with him, but please, if you're still speaking to me, if you can tell me without telling his secrets, please, please tell me: What did I do wrong?

Oh, look, a DVD extra...

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Vienna Teng- Gravity

More Shadow Unit!
Tonight--no, not yet, but eventually tonight--there will be another Shadow Unit over-hiatus DVD extra. (I did a word count on the over-hiatus DVD extras, by the way. 16,000 words, more or less. Another novella. Heh.)

This may be my favorite DVD extra ever. Hard to choose. But this may be it.

Edited to add: And hey--there it is!

Overheard in the corral
I told this to

matociquala, who said I needed to post it.

Two horses live here at Endicott West. They don't belong to us; their owners rent the corral and storage space in the barn. So we have the pleasure of looking at them with none of the responsibilities. I call them the Scenic Horses.

Sometimes the owners of the Scenic Horses go out of town, and ask us to take care of the equines. Like a fond aunt, I get to tend them and give them back at the end of the week: a perfect arrangement.

The owners are on vacation, so Will and I have horse care duties. This involves feeding them their hay, cleaning the corral, refilling their water, spraying them with the (completely useless) fly spray, and, on Monday, pruning the branches of the mesquites and the cactus that are located where horses could hurt themselves on them.

I did all the feeding, watering, and cleaning. Then I pruned much mesquite...and realized I should have brought in the wheelbarrow to haul it out of the corral. The horses were much involved in eating, so I dashed off and fetched back the wheelbarrow.

The wheelbarrow that, um, usually arrives with hay in it.

Jester came to the gate looking hopeful. "You've already got it," I told him. "It's not my fault you eat the alfalfa first and only have grass hay left."

"Hay?" said Jester.

"No. And back up, because you're standing in front of the gate."

"Empty. No hay." He drooped and went back to his hay.

I trundled the barrow across the corral to halfway between the two piles of branches...and turned to find Jester sniffing at one pile of incredibly! thorny! dangerous! mesquite.

"No. You'll scatter it, get a thorn in your foot, and be lame, lame, lame."

"Eat this?"

"No." I loaded the pile in the wheelbarrow.

"In wheelbarrow! Not empty! Eat this!"

"What part of 'no?'"

"In wheelbarrow!"

I trundled over to the other pile. I was followed. I was tripping over an enormous horse.

"Eat this now?"

"No! It's the same stuff it was when it was ten feet further back! Go eat your hay!"

So he beats me to the other pile of mesquite branches, which are dry and dead and, if possible, even more thorny.

I now know it's possible to look disapproving and interested at the same time. "Not eat this. Toy?"

"What are you, a cat? Go eat your breakfast!"

I got the second pile loaded and headed for the gate. Where I had to wrestle with the wheelbarrow, the gate latch, and The Giant Hoofed Cat, who was determined to follow the wheelbarrow out the gate. Because "In wheelbarrow! Not done smelling!"

Coty continued to eat hay throughout this production. Humans = boring.

Current Mood: amused

Vaccines

http://www.data-raptors.com/global-cgi-bin/cgiwrap/emgrasso/blosxom.cgi/tech/vaccines.html

I went to the doctor replacing my previous internist to get my thyroid levels checked yesterday. She seems OK, so I may stay with her instead of looking for a new doctor.

While I was there I mentioned that I thought I was due for a tetanus shot, and she suggested I get the DTP (diptheria, tetanus, pertussis) shot they give to little kids. It seems the ones people my age got as children are wearing off, and there are outbreaks of whooping cough (pertussis) these days because idiots are not getting their children immunized, so the diseases are able to spread. The DTP shot sounded fine to me: I don't need more crud in my lungs after the winter I had.

There have been recent outbreaks of measles, too, so they are going to test some of my blood they took for antibodies. The vaccine was after my time, but I never had the measles even though they were prevalent in the grammar schools I attended.

I should probably get tested for mumps antibodies next time, if they have a test for mumps antibodies: I missed them too. The only one of the 'standard' childhood diseases I actually experienced was chicken pox.

My Mom made sure I got immunized for German Measles when I was in junior high, since I had never had them, because they would cause birth defects if I caught the later in life while pregnant. And I think my youngest brother might have gotten the full set of measles immunizations: Chris is 7 years younger than me, and measles immunization was commoner by the time he reached school age.

I really don't understand people who don't get their kids immunized. But then, I'm old enough to remember when mumps and measles were things you hoped would come through your neighborhood without any of the nastier effects for you or your classmates.

Polio vaccines (both Salk and Sabin) were new and wonderful lifesaving treatments that stopped parents' nightmares and opened the public swimming pools in the summer time in my lifetime. I don't remember the pools being closed, but I remember my parents talking about the change. I was very sick with something when I was one year old, in the summer of 1955, and polio was one of the things they worried about. That was the year the Salk vaccine first became widely available, so I had not been immunized before I was sick. I'm sure I was immunized not long after, and I remember being re-immunized with the oral vaccine later.

And I've read about the European 'childhood diseases' wiping out the Mississippi valley civilizations. We really don't want to have an unexposed, un-immunized population.

I received the actual original 'vaccination' -- against smallpox -- twice that I know of. Once as a small child and once in high-school or junior-high.

Googling, it looks like there is a West Nile vaccine for horses, though it needs to be renewed every year. And West Nile vaccines for humans are in clinical trials in Hawaii and elsewhere. That's one I'd definitely be interested in getting when it becomes available.

And if tropical diseases move north as the climate shifts, we will eventually need to be immunized for some of them on a regular basis, not just when we travel.

Choices

http://www.data-raptors.com/global-cgi-bin/cgiwrap/emgrasso/blosxom.cgi/misc/choices.html

Cool.

Found via a link on matociquala's LiveJournal. An article from Scientific American about how the decision-making part of the brain can get worn out.

No wonder programming and writing stories are both tiring: they both involve a constant choosing of details.

N. Robin Crossby (1954 - 2008)
Crossby, the creator of the Harn setting, is reported to have succumbed to his cancer on July 23rd.

That's the sound of a thousand print designers and typesetters falling over.
Here, have a video. And thank you,

windrose!

Current Mood: *LOL*

A question I don't feel qualified to answer
Quicktongue asked me the following question in comments:

[C]an you suggest any good book review blogs?

Suggestions?

Croc has a flava.

(Okay, the voiceover is stupid.)

Why, lookee here.
An unmarked envelope tucked into my keyboard (hey, it's not a letter rack! show respect!). And in it: VIP passes to a certain cellphone service provider's music fest.

Wonder Woman FTW!

Head of the line AND riding in the golf carts, baby. Wear your sunglasses so the Common People will think you're somebody's drummer.

Current Mood: smug
Current Music: Rabbit in the Moon - Handled Without Care Mix

Dude. Post-novel ennui *exists.*
Reposted from the comment threads...

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making

Current Mood: complacent

i went to hell and to the races
Item the first: Tiny cute computer is tiny and cute. I have gotten all my habitual software (WinAmp, assorted Popcap timewasters, the Zune manager, Semagic, Electric Sheep, Eudora, etc.) and am halfway through the semi-endless process of moving my music and other files over. The hard drive is already groaning in anticipation of the 60+ gigs of music I plan on upholstering it with. Good thing I'm not a gamer....

(The new laptop, for those who are interested in the technical specs, is a 14.1" wide-aspect Dell Latitude D630 core 2 2.0 GHz with 160 gig hard drive--something like double the capacity of the previous machine at half the weight and energy costs. It has a nice big keyboard and it runs XP cheerfully. I had originally fallen in love with the XPS, which brings the shiny and has a bigger hard drive, but that one only allows for Vista and no.

Also, it's

netcurmudgeon's experience--and mine--that the business laptops, though they have less chrome, are more durable. So I am now the proud owner of Daphne the Laptop, at about two hundred dollars more than I paid for Ethel the HP in 2003. God, I love Moore's Law as it applies to my personal electronics. (Yes, you do deduce correctly from these data that the desktop is named Phred and the Zune is named Ginger. Because dancy! Ahem.)

Item the second: my climbing is getting better. My strength/weight ratio still sucks, but it sucks less (not because I've lost any weight: rather, I continue to gain slowly, though perhaps I have topped out around 245, and maybe now that my body has built a completely unreasonable amount of muscle (I've gained twenty pounds in the last ten months while dropping a shirt size and half a jeans size) it will consent to giving up some of the dead weight. Anyway, it's on cereal, sandwiches, soup, and salads until further notice... and maybe the occasional cookie. Because dammit, I want to climb better still. (The good news is, I have been doing all this work in the equivalent of a sixty pound pack, so if that weight does come off and I get down to a nice sensible 170 or so, I will be flying up those overhangs.)

Anyway, as I was saying, strength, balance, and recovery time are all improving, and I think I'm actually back to what I consider a reasonable level of fitness for the first time since 2001. Yay! I've climbed three days this week--Sunday, Monday, and last night, and still managed to go out for a three mile run this morning, in the driving rain, getting soaked to the skin in my new ugly Prana stretchy shorts. I swear, I am 50% more physically competent in the rain. What's up with that?

I started a 5.8 on Monday--couldn't stick the transition over the lip, but I got up on it, which is more than I have ever done on a 5.8 before, and I'm getting to the point where there are a couple of 5.7s that I can send reliably, though I have to dog on the rope a bit on both of them. (There's another one I'm going to try on Monday--or Saturday, if it's still rainy/wet and we don't get to climb out doors.) Yesterday, I did six routes, if you count the bouldering route I made four tries at before I just said "fuckit" and cheated on the last pusbucketing move, which I cannot quite swing.

...Okay, I also rainbowed a bit on #6, but it has a big mantle move and I was le tired by then. Sewing machine legs and the whole deal. (Rainbowing is when you cheat on a route by using hand/footholds intended for other routes. Mantling is when you have to press down on something at chest level to get your feet up higher: it's hard. Sewing machine legs is.... well, self-explanatory if you have ever seen a sewing machine. *g*)

But that last route I'm still proud of, because I used to thrash terribly on the bottom part, and now I'm sailing up that bit. I think any other gym would call it a 5.8, but Prime Climb is special. Their 5.5s are like 5.6s or easy 5.7s I've climbed in other gyms...

Anyway, visible progress. Which makes me think I may someday attain my goal of being able to do 5.10s. And I have to remember to ice my left elbow and take the NSAIDs today, because I do not want the tendinitis getting worse, thanks.

It's nice having a sport again. It's been a long time. And my last sport did not have couches.

Item the third: Tomorrow I have to revise "The Red in the Sky is Our Blood." And do laundry. Saturday is climbing and maybe late lunch at Tapas with The Jeff and Alisa and Tanya. Sunday, to Fall River for an AD&D game. Monday, nose to the grindstone again, as my post-Readercon recovery is pretty much over by then and I have Deadlines To Hit.

Today I am having a goof-off and play with computers day, and then I am going to archery. It has occurred to me that in other jobs, you get, you know, days off. And that maybe I should look into that idea.

Item the fourth: Lone Star Stories, the 'zine with the fastest turnaround time on the block, will be publishing my maudlin Tam Lin poem "Seven Steeds," which some of you may remember from when I posted the very rough draft to this blog last year.

Item the fifth: Dora Goss is smrt.

...I really love this little computer.

64 miles to Lothlorien.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: David Byrne - Like Humans Do (Radio Edit)

Hespira: A Tale of Henghis Hapthorn by Matthew Hughes
Night Shade Books is about to release Hespira: A Tale of Henghis Hapthorn by Matthew Hughes, the first chapter of which can be found here.

Something that I didn't know until yesterday
What's the connection between Arlo Guthrie and Norman Rockwell?

A comment on grammar and Suede
It is really creepy when people refer to themselves in the third person, especially when they use a nickname.

Graham Cracker Packaging

http://www.data-raptors.com/global-cgi-bin/cgiwrap/emgrasso/blosxom.cgi/misc/grahamcrackers.html

It seems that the marketing guys have been playing games with the HoneyMaid Graham Cracker packages.

The boxes are still the traditional size, and there are still three packages of crackers per box, and the crackers are still the same size. But the 3 packages no longer fill the box completely as they once did.

Judging by the amount of empty air space in the box, I suspect the packages used to hold 12 crackers each. Now they only hold 9 each.

I'm glad to have any graham crackers -- most other crackers seem to have one or more ingredients I can no longer eat -- but if they are going to skimp on the package contents, they should reduce the amount of packaging. Or fill the box and raise the price. Just be honest about it.

Insert ritual comments about the good old days here....

Addressing an oversight on the part of Asimov
Apparently while he published books that got put into nine of the ten catagories in the Dewey Decimal system, he never had anything that fell in the 100s (philosophy). Surely it would be possible to cherry-pick from his essays to assemble a book that would qualify?