“I’m not going to do what you and Mom did,” he said.

We were doing homework, my son and I. A paper on inertia for his seventh grade science class. We, or I had been discussing how inertia is like an energy bank for matter. When a particle of matter was moving it stored the energy of its movement until it came into contact with another particle of matter, then the energy transferred,

“What are you not going to do? “ I asked.

“That thing you and Mom did in the pictures!” he said.

“Hu? I said,”what pictures?” (Mom and I never did anything under a camera, the whole idea grosses me out. )

He got down a fat photo album, of our wedding, then opened a page to a photo of me taking the garter from Deb. ”I’ll never do anything like that” he said.

“Sure you won’t “ said I, “I’ll remind you about this someday.”

He was thoughtful for a moment. “ I still won’t do it” he said at last.

‘When you find the right one” I said.  ”you will…”

“So what does inertia do for matter?” I asked.

“It tells matter how far to go” he said. “That’s one of the things I put in my report.”

“Really, “ I said,  “that’s right, where did you get that from?”

“From you “ he said.

“You can’t cite Dad” I said. “for some things…. “

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Why I can’t get over “The Road.”

Cormac McCarthy’s been around for a while but quite frankly, I’ve never read any of his stuff. I was aware of “All the Pretty Horses” but I never read the novel or saw the film (hey! I have a twelve-year -old in the house and that limits us to little more violent than “The Transformers.”)

I picked up a paperback copy of The Road at the grocery store. I literally read the thing in one sitting. Not because it’s short (It really is,) because it’s riveting and I don’t say that very often or lightly.

What is it about?

Ten years before the novel begins, some kind of calamity befalls the Earth. A father and son are homeless.They push their pitiful belongings in a decrepit shopping cart, heading south because they “can’t survive another winter.” The landscape is bleak and gray, ash covers everything and McCarthy reveals in stunningly tight prose that apparently there very little is left alive. The world is wrapped in a gray cold winter that has gone on for the last decade. “Cattle has become extinct” muses the unnamed father as he struggles to protect his son from a very hostile world.

There is little food. What remains is decade old canned goods, nearly depleted.  The pair trudge through cold burned-out husks of cities, long abandoned. There are people around, the most successful are groups of cannibals who  prey on the weak or the careless. They sweep scavengers off the road and force them to march from place to place, serving as mobile larders.  Others are kept precariously alive so that their limbs can be harvested. Fearing this fate, the unnamed protagonist’s wife commits suicide just before the two set out on their journey.  The father,not quite coming to grips with his grief  allows  it to transform into a dogged mission to protect his son.

The prose in the novel is terse and sometimes misspelled. The word “cant” is often used to replace the contraction “can’t.” It’s as if McCarthy is allowing us a peek at an old, moldering journal by someone who is long since dead and gone. In a world that few of his readers can really conceptualize.

This is not an end of the world novel. The world of “The Road” has already ended.  It ended  long before father and son set out to find a better place. Readers are left with the feeling that, despite all the struggle, despite the death of all but a handful of people, the end of all humanity has finally happened and each survivor has to come to grips with their own choices. Then  they must make peace with themselves before their own inevitable end. The father does this by focusing on his son, by creating a world-view that is only about his son’s survival.

This seems to be the subtext of the novel – or at least the part which resonated most strongly.   It’s a book on parenting (strangely enough), the father understanding that his existence is is only about seeing his child to safety. This task is to the exclusion of all else, even morality and ethics. The father is a good man at heart, but he becomes transformed into a ruthless – even cruel person by his task. The unnamed mother’s suicide too is transformed into a sacrifice, so that her husband would not have to protect her as well. It’ an extraordinary  tale of bravery in the face of inevitable and utter disaster. (Of course as a couple of people have pointed out that McCarthy may not have meant for Mom’s suicide to be a heroic act. I’m against suicide as a matter of principle so perhaps I’m mirroring my own feelings in this novel – as the author surely intended!)

If you read this book, do it by candlelight on a cold winters night and keep a window open. The chill you feel will not be from the cold!

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Christmas trip.

Well, I don’t know when I’m going to be able to post this. My Internet connection has been reduced to a 2.4 Mps pipe. We took ‘E and one of his cousins to the great-white north or close enough to count.  Both of them are Florida boys so seeing snow is always a treat.

First we had to fight traffic and lousy weather . We drove straight through after a long stopover at the step-mom’s family spread (this is where we picked up E’s cuz.) Then we drove and drove, it started raining by the time we reached VA and didn’t get out of it until we reached the In-law’s place. We rested up Sunday, the boys ran around in the snow for a while, most of it has melted off, but we might get a couple of inches Monday.

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Avatar – it Might not Suck!

That new Tarzan flick – what’s it called again?

Avatar – now I remember!

Firstly; I know Hollywood really can’t stand James Cameron – at least the working stiffs in Hollywood can’t stand him. “Cameron – he freaking drowns people” they say.

He brings in the bucks though – the bean- counters and the suits like him.

So he did Piranha 2 which had some cute chicks in bikinis, some pretty good cinematography (really!) It didn’t completely suck even as a grade B monster flick, or was it grade C?

He did Terminator which was an awesome low budget Science Fiction flick, Terminator Two which was a pretty good big budget action flick.  He did Aliens which was pretty cool for a grade A Monster flick, then the Abyss, Titanic and a host of others that made da bucks. If he wanted to film Jesus Christ getting whipped until we all feel sick to our stomachs, the suits would let him.

Oops! Someone else already did that (my-bad!)

OK so he wants to do an animated feature that mixes live action with CGI, but seamlessly. He wants monsters as characters but they have to be utterly inhuman and be computer animated, but based on real actors. He wants to, not only scratch design every artifact shown on the screen, he wants to design a whole new camera technology. He wants to do this in 3D, he wants to film actors and have a computer translate them into his monsters in real time. He wants to design a realistic alien biosphere – realistic aliens and all that junk.

And he want a pony!

The suits say “OK, just bring us the bucks!”

So he makes Avatar which is concocted from every Science Fiction book or movie he’s ever heard of. It’s going to be fresh and original….. Hu- what?

The movie is also the most expensive in history – and it’s a Tarzan flick!

Basic Tarzan movie is – white guy gets left with savages, they freak him out for a while, he starts grooving with them. Since he’s a white guy and we “know” he’s better than they are he ultimately out-savages the savages. This is a trope and it’s been done by everyone from ERB (Tarzan – John Carter and all those Pellucidar books.) it’s been done as a Western (Dances With Wolves.) It’s been done in several Japanese novels and   movies (Shogun and “The Bushido Blade”come to mind.)  It’;s been done in countless comic books etc. Basically it’s been done to death.

It was even done n a little movie called “My tasty Frenchman” – but the protagonist gets eaten in the end.

So let’s see if I understand this, Cameron just made a movie that’s the biggest worn out plot evah! The only one that even comes close is “boy meets girl.” And guess what sports fans! Plot for Avatar is;
White guy becomes doe-eyed ten foot tall blue monster on distant planet that humans want to rape. White guy finds that he likes being blue-furry critter, a lot! (big surprise his life sucked anyway.)  He meets naked blue furry, doe-eyed SHE monster and they do the nasty under a rainbow waterfall or something. He finds out that humans are going to strip-mine the whole place and build the biggest WalMArt ever, white guy decides blue furry monsters are people too, even if they don’t have WalMarts and big honking guns. White guy fights back for what it right and just. Only he uses bows and arrows while the humans use their big honking guns.

White guy gets his blue furry ass blown off and wakes up in his human body again. Gets docked for the time he went native.

OK; perhaps Cameron can pull this thing off, the film LOOKS fabulous, what I’ve seen of it (which is darn little.)

I mean, why is it 3D? I have never seen a 3D movie that was really enhanced by the process. Basically, I can’t tell if stuff is 3D unless it’s right in front of me anyway. My eyes are too close together and so are yours. Why do you think marksmen close one of their eyes?

Also, there are a buttload of out of work Science fiction writers out there who would kill to get involved in a flick with a tenth of the budget of Avatar. Can we get some real writers for a change? I’ve seen Hamlet done with no set and almost no props, it was still Hamlet. You can spend a billion dollars to dress up a pig – get ghost writers and do a big  book deal, and it’s still Sarah Pailn.

Avatar might be a very enjoyable story, but so far all they publicists have been saying is “ooooh look at the pretty lights!”

It might not suck, but so far it’s hard to tell! I  hope it doesn’t suck. Then again, I’m too poor to see it in the theaters anyway. Sorry James!

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Going back to my roots.

OK, so the first time I went to a Science Fiction convention was around 1976. As I recall there were long lines and a small huckster room, but lots of people who shared my only guilty pleasure at the time. Wow, there were other people just like me!

We stood outside the film room and listened to the last reel of the 1933 film King Kong.  Then we were went  inside to a packed room and watched the Douglas Trumbull film Silent Running. I was enchanted. I’d of course seen lots of Science Fiction by then (mostly in the old “book” form) but Silent Running was the first “hard SF” film I had seen in a long time. Silent Running is a freaking BEEEEE! Movie, I am well aware of that. So what, I liked it anyway. I went to a lot of cons after that. Most some of my very dear friends at them (ans SCA too but the cons were first.)

One was the Stone Hill launch #1 which was in some seedy church in Tampa. St9one Hill was a budding Science Fiction fan club that was just starting up.

I think George Takei was a this thing but I can’t be sure. (Memory is the second thing to go!) I went to a number of others and served in various capacities on staff. After I left the service I rejoined Stonehill and actively went to meetings for a few years. After I got involved with the SCA and other such things I more or less abandoned the Stone-hillers. I still went the cons from time to time – they simply were not a main focus anymore (getting married and setting up a household was.) I have fond memories of those times though.

I went to Stonehill’s Necornomicon(link) this weekend. It was being held in Downtown Saint Petersburg which was already busy with the Times Reading Festival and the monthly street market. The turnout was only so-so and I expect that they will me moving to a new venue next year. I heard there was some sabotage too, someone is pointedly damaging hotel property during the cons and apparently this has been going on for a few years.

We took E’ Saturday , he didn’t want to go but we “made him” He didn’t know what to make of all the people in the silly costumes. But he soon warmed up to the filmrooms and especially the lan gaming. We say several people that we had not seen for many years (hey Sid!) I got into a couple of deep conversations with folks about writing-and-publishing (and computers.) I watched a couple of films with E’.

We hung out a the con suite for a while and goggled at “Inappropriate-chick in her Red Sonja getup (there is always one Inappropriate chick at every convention, its in the bylaws somewhere.) We watched the costume contest, this was the year of Batman Villains and Zombies for some reason. The troupe of Zombie Girl Scouts won the show. A couple of our friends were doing a Stampunk thing and got honorable mention.

I had a fun moment, I’d wandered by one of the film rooms, they were showing Wall-E, a freaking great movie. Someone was talking about geology “the moon has no Earthquakes” he said, “there is no atmosphere on the moon and that’s what causes quakes.” He was saying al lot more absurd stuff, I finally looked at him and said “cool story bro!” which in some places on the Internet is kind of an insult. Apparently he got it because he shut up and watched.

We enjoyed it, neec to go to more, nuff said!

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“The World is a Vampire!”

OK , so the weather has changed from steamy-hot to nice Florida Fall/Spring. This weekend was unbelievably pleasant compared with the last couple. At practice last weekend I almost got overheated.

I haven’t been writing a whole lot of late. I have not been in the mood (and I invariably hear the voice of Patrick Stewart roar “MOOD! MOOD is a thing for cattle and loveplay!” Well mood does have something to do with it. I was (over the summer) in one of those periods where I pretty much didn’t follow my own path, I followed the path of that other people wished for me and (inevitably) I had some difficulty coping. Hopefully that’s over and done with, for better or worse I need to follow my own instincts on some things and worry less about the possible consequences. As my lawyer so correctly says, don’t do anything illegal and you will be fine.

Segueing into…. I went to the Anonymous protest last weekend. it was very small; only about eight of the Florida Anon contingent were there. I didn’t make the first march but I followed them around for the second and took lots of video.

I have no idea where I’m going with this, I mean; filming in downtown Clearwater is fraught with peril. Scientology is not known for turning the other cheek and allowing things that offend them to pass unanswered. I’m of several minds on this, on the one hand I don’t like the idea of tangling with a fanatical “religiously cloaked” psychological mind game focused on extracting as much money and time out of it’s member as possible. People in Clearwater for the most part don’t like them, but they also don’t want to get involved. I quite understand! I don’t want to get involved either.

But then the other side of me starts yammering and it goes kind of like this. “The United States of America was formed by a group of people who didn’t want to make the same mistakes that were made in Europe in the previous 400 years or so. They wanted to create a better place, free of the twin tyrants of theocracy and autocracy. They wanted a system of government that was not based on someones interpretation of “teh truvth” but a system of laws that could be dynamic and change over time. A government that reformed, remade itself, adapted.

Scientology stands to challenge this concept. By the words of it’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard it blankly states that Scientology intends to gain influence in federal, state and local government and replace our current system with something of it’s own manufacture. Not just in the US – everywhere. Once this is done they will forcibly bring their form of “enlightenment” to all of humanity “clear the planet is the way that they put it.” Anyone who opposes this plan is thought to be a “degraded being” in their eyes and if they take action to oppose it, they are labeled a “suppressive person” or SP.  Once again, according to their “scripture, SPs are to be “disposed of without pity.”

That’s what they believe. This to my eyes, this is just like the Klu Klux Klan making blank assertions about white supremacy or the National Socialists talking about the Jews.

I have a huge problem with this. First of all, Scientology is not the end-all-be-all of religion. It doesn’t even appear to BE a religion (not to me anyway,) but of course that designation is completely subjective. Whatever Scientology wants to be, it has become a liability in my mind. It brings conflict and corruption to everything it touches. Hubbard had a few good ideas but his psudo-psychological programs amount to little more than hypnosis and wishful thinking. People who stay with the program think differently than people outside of Scientology and I don’t see that  as an improvement. In fact (again, my opinion;) people who sty in Scientology and adopt Hubbard’s dogmatic way of thinking don’t even communicate very well. It’s either “I tell you” or “you tell me.” There is little idea exchange and no synthesis of thought to them.

“Try it out and see for yourself!” the Scientology members shout. “How can you make a judgment without trying it!? It helped me!”

The difficulty lies in what is helpful to an individual, this can also be subjective. People claim that cigarettes are helpful or schedule one drugs. People claim that chiropractic faith healing is helpful and I have no doubt that it is – to a certain extent. Scientology could indeed be helpfully to people ,but psychological counseling would probably have worked just as well. Everyone is different and there there is no telling what will assist one person over another. Scientology is not a panacea to cure all ills. It strikes me as unscientific and arbitrary, perhaps helping people in some small way by boosting confidence but costing far more terms of money and psychological damage than benefits.

That’s just my opinion mind you, if people like spending big bucks to have some high school dropout inform them that they have to repurchase expensive courses over and over again because someone didn’t transcribe them right – that is completely their own business. I think it’s stupid and might even say that I think it’s stupid. You can call me stupid back but you don’t have the right to tell people I’m a criminal just because I think you are being a dope.

Anyway, my inner voices tell me that organizations like Scientology must adapt to societal norms (such as they are ) or perish. They need to understand the environment that they exist in and instead of trying to “handle” it, try to live with it and enhance it. An amoeba understands this.

Scientology can’t seem to do that. They want to take society over, destroying their foes and manufacture lies about them. This is right out of their so-called “scripture.” What they accomplish in most cases are poor relationships with the people around them and many unnecessary conflicts. Their friends turn out to be people just  using them – not friends at and their foes become hardened.

It’s big fat bunch of wasted effort and it has the same results, every-single- time.

I’ve been watching this group for a long time and I’m not sure they can fix themselves, the whole premise is wrong, Hubbard created a big fat fantasy for people to live in. They firewall themselves against society and when they poke their heads out they find that people have moved on and changed.

There is too much corruption in their structure, too much institutional deception, too much pressure on members and they have a terrible reputation, one that will be difficult to shake in the coming decades.

And they don’t seem to be even trying. In fact, if I’m reading the jungle drums right, they have just got started with Anonymous and things are about to get interesting.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Blue Cheese – finally!

I did this little thing early this year and gave a version of it (with real names) to E’s soccer team. I messed around with getting a version up on YouTube  – they bounced the audio because of copyright stuff. I just left things ass is but in my travels I discovered that Google pretty much has a blanket policy against any music that is not created by a YouTube member and that pulling for copyright happens to almost any soundtrack being put up for any reason.

Of course fair use is fair use and it’s being pointed out in the YouTube community that non commercial usage of tracks happens all of the time, heck people have been putting up their entire CD collections for years. Somehow I can’t believe using using an old Dire Straights song as background to my son’s soccer team’s video (which I did because I wanted to) is violating copyright.

So I finally got around to disputing their bounce and you know what?

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A few Pennsic photos

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So some more Pennsic.

Ok, so I’m a geek. I dress up in this faux roman garb, sit around in a tent and write blog posts on my laptop.

I dug out my armor today, did some adjustments and wandered up to the field to get inspected. Pennsic inspections are supposed to be this big freaking deal but I’ve never had much trouble with it. They wanted a picture ID this year, and that forced me to walk back to camp (all of five min away.) Afterward I did pickups for a while, until it started raining hard. There has been a succession of fronts coming through, today was hot and dry until late afternoon.

Tomorrow is supposed to be wet again. Deb and I might go into town one last time, I’ve got a case of gluten free beer on order and we need to do laundry.

Those camp bunnies are doing fine, all but one are eating regularly and they are starting to crop grass. They plan to release them on the final day of the war, hopefully they will be old enough to make it on their own.

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So Pennsic

Well, once again we loaded up the family jalopy and headed out to the Pennsic War.  Deb, E’ and I got on the road at about 3:00PM on Sunday, July 26th 2009. After about 23 hours of driving and several Starbucks’ stops we arrived at Cooper’s Lake PA which is located in the rolling hills of Butler County.

(Monday)

We got unpacked and set up by around 4PM, then we went into town for a shopping run.

(Tuesday)

Some of my campmates found some baby rabbits. E’ is enchanted and (of course) wants to bring one home.

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