Nocturne/Mildly entertaining ourselves to death

Kept awake into the wee hours--well, past the wee hours--into the wee hours is normal for me--by the neighbours' kid's party yestereve. His crowd is actually pretty well-behaved by standards I remember from my own late adolescence--no loud music, little that really qualifies as shouting, and they usually knock off around two or so--but our house is pretty close to the next on that side, and there's a driveway between that's all concrete between two brick walls.

In other words, a big echo chamber, suitable for amplifying even mumuring conversation and projecting it into our bedroom.

So myself and my lovely wife wound up sitting up late, nattering on why there seems so little in the culture/entertainment area of our lives that passes as halfway worthwhile of late. Been in a dry run re movies, books, plays, little coming out that's much exciting (with the singular exception, I'd think, of Zhang Yimou's Hero, which I expect will justify its running time despite some grunting from certain corners about Yimou's rather compromised subtext on authority--gee guys, let's remember who he has to apply to for approval of his works--Yimou has rarely disappointed me).

I got on a riff re two possibilities explaining this. Either (i) we're all amused to death, spoiled with too much culture, or (ii) it's a subtle effect of the globalization of culture--an alienation that creeps in when so much of what we see, read, and watch is marketed to an audience of billions, stripped of a sense of place, often subtly or not so subtly infantile in its construction to appeal to a sort of cultural common denominator. I named in my early morning meditation even a number of actually quite respected works of late--The Life of Pi (really not that smart a book, sorry, by my call, despite the accolades heaped upon it around these parts--all feelgood ecumenism, random insults to one's intelligence, and no balls ) and Saving Private Ryan--heavy on the crass emotional manipulation.

Could be those things I guess. Or a combination of both, perhaps. And a third possibliity is I'm just getting brutally cynical and demanding in my old age.

There was more in there. Found myself musing on the popularity of the 'yes, it's incredibly stupid, and barely a giggle at best, but it's funny because we're not really trying too hard to be funny, hip, right?' humour that seems so popular in some corners of the net of late. But that could get to be an awfully long essay.

Maybe I'll write that one in a few days. If there's nothing on TV.

Moore

... amuses me.

Y'know how it is, trying to breathe downwind from a sewage lagoon? Gotta wonder what it's like tasting the breeze out of 1600 Pennsylvania these days.

Glad I left DC, in retrospect.

Rejection slip

Another agent passed on the book. Received their response today.

Gotta get more queries out. Mebbe this weekend.

Storm coming in, methinks. The wind is nice after a muggy day, however.

Love storms. Always have. Winter or summer.

Just in case you were wondering...

... But I'm a Cheerleader is not a Dubya bio.

But someone really oughtta consider making that film. Poor young Dubya, male cheerleader, and thus obviously a candidate for severe reprogramming by nutbar conservative Christian homophobes, is shipped off to a bizarre 'learn to be straight' camp... and at the critical moment, he protests, flabbergasted:

"But I'm a bigot!"

Poor guy.

Looming deadlines

Promised myself I'd have the first chapter of my next book written by the last week of this month. It's now that. I have a chapter written, all right, but I'm trying to decide if it counts, for various reasons.

Three book ideas, all wrestling in my head. They all got issues.

Time to choose a side and start swinging, I guess.

Fun with ray tracers

Against my better judgement, spent a bit of time this evening playing with POV-Ray--the (anhydrous) caffeine molecule now in the background is the result.

Okay. So I'm no Irving Geis. Fun stuff, anyway.

Tea and scones with the ghost/Deep time and the Grenville orogen

We went up to the Mackenzie King estate this afternoon to have tea and scones with the ghost.

William Lyon Mackenzie King was prime minister of Canada on and off for a total of 22 years between 1921 and 1948--through the second world war. His estate at Kingsmere, in the Gatineau hills, is open to the public, and has a nice tea room--it's a great place to go on a cool, sunny afternoon. My lovely wife, my delightful daughter and myself sat on a porch of the estate, overlooking the grounds, which are nicely decorated with flower beds and pseudo-ruins, sipped tea, munched scones with cream and jam.

The 'ruins' are one of the oddest features of the place. Mackenzie King had them built from bits of other buildings he had shipped up to his estate for that purpose--more details here.

Yep. He actually built some ruins. Mackenzie King--grandson to William Lyon Mackenzie, leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion--was marvellously eccentric. A spiritualist, the old gent was infamous for having consulted mediums to consult with deceased relatives. Due to his meticulous diaries--now online here, details of the seances themselves are now public.

The estate is believed by some to be haunted--either because Mackenzie King died there in 1950, or as a byproduct of the 'psychic research' he conducted. Our daughter was disappointed--since we'd told her we'd be having tea with a ghost--that it didn't show up.

We told her it had probably had an early lunch.

The Gatineau hills themselves, in which the estate is located, are themselves much older ghosts--the weathered remains of an ancient landform--the roots of mountains around a billion years old. The Grenville orogen (mountain building era) which formed the mountain range which was later ground down to become the Gatineaus occurred around 1 to 1.3 billion years ago. This orogen was an extensive reworking of older crust--a violent and ongoing plate collision. There are some younger (early Cambrian/late Precambrian--450 to 675 million years before present) intrusions; these are quite small. So; generally, if you tread upon a rock in this area, it's likely to be around a billion years old.

The Grenville orogen may have been the biggest mountain forming system in the history of the world. Formed as plates met and collided in the middle of a continent, the system formed much as the Himalayas are forming today, modern traces of it sketch a line 5,000 km long, from Labrador to Mexico. There's a rift in there; it might not have been quite so long before later crustal movements separated its ends. By any standards, however, it was gigantic.

Contemplating the deep time in the history of this place, the most striking feature I can imagine is nearly endless aeons of silence. At one billion years ago, as far as we know, there were as yet no animals, nothing that could be called multicellular, and eukaryotes were just getting started (or, possibly, a few hundred millions years off as yet; genetic studies are building to suggest primitive fungi may have been getting their start here, though there aren't any real fossils to speak of to address this question more directly). The largest identifiable life forms were the boulder-like communities of blue-green algae called stromatalites, and they'd been clustering in shallow briny waters undisturbed by anything so modern as browsing herbivores since the early Archaean--quite probably, they and their free-living blue-green cousins formed the Earth's oxygen atmosphere, over these billions of years. We don't know if there were yet lichens; the only very few preserved fossils from this age may have been lichen like associations between blue green algae and filamentous bacteria (modern lichens are blue greens in symbiosis with fungi), or, for that matter, may have been inorganic artifacts; though according to recent genetic studies, there may well have been real lichens, and these would have been the sole inhabitants of the great mass of the continents.

Land plants wouldn't be on the scene until at least another 300 million years (and possibly another 500 million years, depending on who you ask). No trees, nothing that walks or crawls, or grows more than the few millimetres high was anywhere to be found on the face of the land. The vast continent would have been utterly silent, apart from the hiss of the breakers at the shores of the ocean, and the occasional sounds of wind, rain, and thunder. It would also have been utterly barren, apart from (again, possibly) carpets of lichens where conditions permitted.

Imagine--nothing moved--nothing that was not moved by the wind or by the action of the waves. And with no trees to soften its edges, the young, jagged mountain range just forming would have had a uniquely stark relief--bare and barren, a jagged scar across the surface of the continent, tracing in a great sinuous line the edges of the colliding plates.

A few more of my favourite things

Got up fairly early, zipped off on the bike to pick up some fresh bread, made french toast for wife and progenus, then took a bit of time to finish my coffee, sit down, and read.

There's really nothing finer than a cool, clear, sunny late summer morning, a steaming hot mug of fresh ground coffee brewed in a french press, a decent book, and an hour or two to take it easy.

The little one now likes to be read to frequently. Since she now knows what I'm reading isn't likely to be particularly to her taste (she used to ask me to read it out loud now and then), she brings me picture books; I'll read one, ask her to look at the pictures of another while I get through the next chapter of my own reading, and then we'll repeat this.

Makes an interesting juxtaposition for me, however--Eco and the Teddy Bear Picnic.

But I'm a cheerleader

Woke in the middle of the night, couldn't sleep. Found myself watching But I'm a Cheerleader on Showcase in the wee hours. Cute, bizarre film. Girl's parents decide they're afraid she's a lesbian, freak out, send her to a hilariously over the top 'deprogramming' camp with distinct conservative Christian overtones, where she's to learn, apparently, how to be het. In the course of this, she discovers she does indeed (ahem) prefer the company of women. And the company of one young woman in particular.

Sweet film in its way. Happy ending. I'm a sucker for that stuff. But damn I don't envy gays.

(Obligatory lecherous aside) Well, except for lesbians. But only because they seem to get all the hot chicks... (End obligatory lecherous aside)

Seriously, again. I remember adolescence being hell enough without that additional complication. Yes, now you not only have to figure out this whole damned dating thing... but you have to cope with the reality that actually finding someone you like and who likes you back is going to involve one whole hell of a lot more risk. Make a wrong move, and you might just get disowned and/or seriously pummelled.

Yikes, gang.

Now I could use this as an excuse for one more really broad swipe at all religion. And hey, I could also do a whole essay on the dynamics of alienation, ostracization, fear of the other, and how it's expressed through dominant institutions...

But nah. While it's got its place, this ain't it. And I'd fear that kind of discussion would wind up being too kind to the uptight, narrow little pricks who make it their mission in life to make miserable anyone they meet who won't get with their program. Let me make this clear: just 'cos that's how it often is doesn't make it any more justifiable that you're one of the people making it that way. And let's face it, though religion gives most (and probably almost all) of them their excuse, I'm betting a lot of them could find another, in its absence.

I need a bumper sticker for this cause. Yeah, there's "Mean people suck." But it's so generic. And let's face it, I can't use that sticker. Anyone who knows me could justifiably see it as self-hating.

How 'bout 'Have you smacked a homophobe today?'

Hey. That sings.

All the lonely people

Browsed around the blogs on these servers a bit. Quite the variety in here.

Try this. Click the 'next blog' button up there, and keep clicking it. Look around. Or click this link. Wander through a forest of memories, dreams, reflections.

My stroll went past a few teens deep in the throes of the "no one understands me" hormone, more than a few actually much less so--a delightful range of creative types--a lotta folk with a lotta photos--some art aficionados, a handful of people with hobbies they seem to feel need to be shared, a lot of girls and young women with sites heavy on pink fonts and candy hearts.

Where do they all come from?