Sonofa...

.. insert vast, entertaining, and varied string of profanity, rich in lurid, graphic anatomical and sexual references and copious amounts of blasphemy offending the sensibilities of all major religions (along with several minor ones) here...

So, so far, the only actual feedback I've got on the manuscript I sent into that critical circle is that the name of the protagonist is the same as that of a principal character in the 1973 Newbery winner Dark Is Rising...

It's gotta change, sadly, obviously. Latter work is also YA/F stuff, and, also obviously, quite well-known (and never mind that I'd never heard of it), so there's just no way I can keep that name.

But dammit, I'm gonna miss it. I'd really got to know and to like the character under that name... gawkiness, awkwardness, misanthropy (and occasional psychoses) and all...

Ah well... Guess I need a new name...

And this time, it seems to me, I'm gonna have to stay well away from those nice, generic English boy names... I need something whose odds of overlapping randomly with another known literary character are effectively zero.

So: the erstwhile Will's new name is now: Willard Clarence Emil Hossenfeffer Bluntenpluto Boutrous-Boutros Klaus Witherspoon-Leclaire-Vespucci-Bunyon...

...the Third.

Either that or Heathcliff. Has that been done?

Unclassifiable

Following my raving to Holly about them, happened to put The Silver Hearts' Our Precious City on one of my work machines.

The player is CDDB-enabled, so it goes out, gets all the track names and other stuff... And in the 'yep, that's about right' category, I note that, while all the titles are right, the CDDB entries on all of the tracks comes back as with the genre set as 'unclassifiable'.

Yep. That they are.

Manuscript idiosyncrasies/frauds a plenty

From the words a certain automated manuscript handler flagged as being suspected mispellings, in a recent manuscript of mine:

accusatory gotta meddlers pummelings sorta archway holographic megaliths quarrelling streetlights astroturf humour radiodating thickset charade inlays neighbourhoods railings tonne clacking kempt nomadic

ringleader tonnes cooly loony nutters sadnesses tryouts doormat louts orbs shimmery twerp favoured mafia pithily smirks unmenacingly gonna marvellously pleasantries smouldering walkaround

Yeah, a lot of these are just Britishisms; it was, apparently, a US install of ispell. But personally, I say any work that contains both the words 'astroturf' and 'radiodating' has probably got something going for it.

But, then, that's probably just me.

On the subject of radiodating, yes, this work makes some references to it. So I actually spent a bit of time, some time back, Googling about, making sure my knowledge on the subject was reasonably current.

And doing that, it was a bit depressing, in that the internet signal/noise ratio was unusually bad in this area. A whole lotta crackpot evangelicals out there publishing deceptive stupidity on the subject. Apparently, they're still pissed that the rubidium-strontium method—oh yeah, and the lutetium-hafnium, the samarium-neodymium, the uranium-lead and the lead-lead methods—all give dates of 3.5 and 3.6 billion years for the Amitsoq gneisses. Instead of the 6,000 years or so they'd rather prefer. And never mind the isochron work that's been done on the meteorites.

Savages in this town. Sometimes, it seems to me, the 'net's so full of these utter frauds, it's a wonder anyone ever learns anything halfway accurate using the web.

The Tuesday harbinger of doom

Yeah, yeah, so the 'Monday harbinger of doom' is a day late. So what? It ain't the end of the world...

(pause for laugh track)

The trouble with this feature, I'm finding, isn't a lack of material. It's choosing which apocalypse or apocalyptic group (I'm branching out) to feature. And we had strong contenders this week, including (i) the usual constant inflow of data on global warming, (ii) rumours of an impending mass suicide by an FLDS group in Utah (hardly the end of the world for the rest of us, I know, but topical, all the same, as it does seem to be an apocalyptic sect), and (iii) a nice little bit by Bill Moyers on the influence of the Millenarians and associated idiots on US politics. Among others.

Be that as it may, I'm stickin' with my previous theme here, at least through this week, keepin' it to the hard, biological, and real. So this week's harbinger of doom is still the Marburg epidemic in Angola. I give it this honour in recognition of the UNICEF chief commenting it is not yet under control... and the fact that it is now, officially, the worst Marburg ever, with 150 deceased and mourned, 163 cases, and a mortality rate of at least 88 percent.

The good news: it looks like the Luanda cases didn't transmit. And you can just bet there's a whole lotta people mopping the sweat off their brows right now, thinking about that. Looks like the only mercy here, really, is it's got a relatively long incubation, so containment's still feasible.

Still. One awfully unpleasant bug.

Give me back my hour

Aaaarrrrgggghhhh I hate those first few days after the switch to daylight saving time.

This year, I'd have especially have liked to take a pass. Seems to me if you've got a kid under a few months old at home, you should be able to skip the whole business. Sleep in an extra hour for the whole damned summer, or something.

But no, here we are. Eyelids propped open with toothpicks. There ain't enough caffeine in the world. Everybody stay well away from me, on the freeway home tonight.

Stop the violins

In the 'one more reason I'm probably a really annoying person to live with' category, I've actually really been enjoying working on the violin.

Only learning it (there's a post back there somewhere) because my daughter's taking lessons, and in the Suzuki method, that means one of the parents has to come along for the ride for a while. This, however, has been no hardship. Quite like the instrument.

(Just don't tell a certain former cello teacher of mine. Man had this weird, tribal thing goin' on as regards violins. This would probably make me a defector or something, in his eyes.)

The thing that made it work for me was just getting the instrument set up right. Daughter's teacher advised me to get a chin rest arranged more over the tail piece; made a big difference.

The weird thing: contrary to what you might expect, my practising actually seems to calm our infant son...

But then, mebbe he's just so wrapped up in trying to figure out who's strangling that screaming cat that he forgets, for a while, whatever it was he was complaining about.

Awwww....

Awwww... what a cute little filovirus.

Oh, okay, not so little—not for a filovirus. Anyway, Vince sends this URL—a link to a picture of a giant, stuffed, plush Ebola virus.

Isn't it just adorable?