I'll be here all week, folks

In an IM chat with a colleague just now, he asks me what I'd call my hair (as to why, no, it didn't make much sense in context either). I responded, within about five seconds...

"Toupee Shakur"

...aaaaand...

"Rugsputin"

... and some minutes later, also came up with "Herr Pieszc".

Yeah, I think I'm pretty funny.

The trouble with poet

... is how do you know it's deceased?

Stick to priest.

This Sondheim interlude is brought to you by the good people at The Scientific Indian.

Saw Sweeney Todd in Arlington in reprise lo these many years ago with my lovely wife. Fun show. A bit disconcerting, tho', to be warned that sitting too close to the stage 'might get messy'.

It's coming

I know I promised certain old friends I know read this they'd get a look at the manuscript I've been shopping around a while right after I'd done some necessary work on it, and that it shouldn't take too long. This is just to say to you folk: it's coming, I'm sorry it's taken longer than I told you.

There's a type of dialogue in it that's particularly labour-intensive—in which one of the speakers is learning a language, and that language doesn't, actually, exist, so keeping it believable in these scenes is serious work—half the work's keeping the language itself believable, half is the usual complicated method acting of trying to keep speakers in character—in this case in a situation in which mutual comprehension between the speakers is particularly constrained, and the POV character itself is having a hell of a time working out what's going on. Work on that stuff is proving painfully slow. And while I've finally settled on some of the larger structural issues I'd identified some weeks back, working the necessary modifications smoothly back into the narrative is delicate work.

Another week, probably, before I've got the still rough but cohesive long version I'm happy to let a few eyes view. Provided I stay healthy this time.

Typical male

... mostly, anyway.

So I took the BBC's Brain sex test thingy, following a link at Judith Berman's LiveJournal.

Mostly, no real surprises. It seems to think I'm a typical but not extreme male, at 50 overall toward the male end of the scale, which is apparently average for my sex. Extremely strong spatial ability. Probably nothing surprising there, given my background.

The one really odd result: it found I'm an unusually accurate observer of emotional states in others (9/10, apparently). Unsurprisingly, this is thought to be a female trait, though it looks like their own averages don't actually support this (both sexes average 6.6).

Cool. That's gotta be useful for something.

Other odd thing: a finger length metric which kinda contradicts the theories. It's supposed to indicate testoesterone levels in the womb during your development, and this is, apparently, generally higher for males, highest for those with lots of brothers.

I've got one sister, two brothers. But my fingers, for what it's worth, suggest lower prenatal testosterone exposure than is average even for females.

Go fig. Averages and deviations, you know.

Breathing again

... provisionally, anyway. But aren't we all.

Yeah yeah, I'm feeling a bit morbid this morning. Natural enough side-effect, I expect, of reading through the rest of John M. Barry's history of the 1918 pandemic while in the throes of a thoroughly unpleasant (if vastly less unpleasant and deadly) viral invasion yourself. Don't you just hate it when it actually hurts to breathe? I mean, I really like breathing.

Anyway. It seems to have stopped hurting. Life goes on.

As to the Barry book: it was comprehensive, well-paced, but the prose style got a bit grating by the end. He had this recurring motif: 'This was influenza, only influenza'... which could be pretty dramatic applied to some of the more grisly and dramatic things that virus happened to do. But it did get on my nerves, after a while.

In fairness, I think the basic trouble is the horror of this thing is pretty hard to grapple with for anyone. Barry tried hard to do so, tried to work some of the more effective old staples of horror writing to make it fly—the leaden, understated sentence summing up each new misery, dropped onto the end of a more descriptive paragraph with the air of a coup de grâce, the leading 'It would get worse, still...' or equivalent at the end of each chapter leading to the next bit of nastiness—and, naturally, it comes off as a bit melodramatic—but then, the pandemic was one dramatic bit of business. Not sure what else he was supposed to do.

As to my own reactions, as a guy who's spent a bit of time in rural areas, I found the descriptions of what it did to Inuit and Amerindian populations in Alaska and Labrador particularly chilling... the image of being in a tiny, isolated settlement, having that thing tear through, killing just about everybody, leaving no-one strong enough actually to keep wood on the fire, after which the dogs tear up the corpses, that's got a level of terror for me somehow more unsettling even than the scenes from urban areas—piled corpses and mass graves recalling the worst of the plague years.

Anyway: full marks for the scholarship, which was comprehensive. Full marks for the narrative arch, which was positively self-indulgent (and I'm all for that) at following numerous side-currents in the lives of the researchers trying to work out what the disease agent was. And suspended judgement for the prose style. Like I said, I don't know what else you're supposed to do with this subject. Criticizing it as a bit heavy on the pipe organ music almost seems petty. Like complaining to the captain of the Titanic as he tearfully addresses his crew for the last time that he's overacting, or something.

Palast cuts through the crap

Judy, Karl Rove ain't no "source." A confidential source -- and I've worked with many -- is an insider ready to put himself on the line to blow the whistle on an official lie or hidden danger. I would protect a source's name with my life and fortune as would any journalist who's not a craven jerk (the Managing Editor of Time Magazine comes to mind).

But the weasel who whispered "Valerie Plame" in Miller's ear was no source. Whether it was Karl Rove or some other Rove-tron inside the Bush regime (and no one outside Bush's band would have had this information), this was an official using his official info to commit a crime for the sole purpose of punishing a real whistleblower, Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, for questioning our President's mythological premise for war in Iraq.

— Gregory Palast, Mr. Rove and the Access of Evil

He slices... He dices... Look at 'im go!

Should also mention: I'd be about the last guy on the planet to deny the player currently talking through his lawyer's got some serious chops, conniving weasel-wise. But in case anyone's wondering, no, this particular set of shenanigans hardly qualifies as anything original or clever. My reporting experience ain't mostly big league, but at any level of politics, I can assure you there are any number of two-bit wannabe hatchetmen in ill-fitting cheap suits who'll happily bound off the record to take a few shots at a rival, offer up anything to damage them. Ain't nothin' new. I knew lots of 'em, in the day, and most of those were low-rung types who only got elected 'cos they called slightly more neighbours than their rivals. Otherwise, they probably couldn't strategize their way out of a wet paper bag. Smart reporters learn not to become such low-life's tools.

Smart reporters, I repeat and emphasize.

Information overload

Bob Harris made an interesting observation, just now:

Right this minute, on the BBC World service: a lengthy report on humanitarian efforts in Africa. No news crawl. If you didn't know the London bombings had happened already, you wouldn't even know.

Right this minute, on CNN International: a lengthy report on anti-terrorism efforts in other countries, so far specifically framed as a series of successful trades: decreasing freedom for increasing surveillance, with greater security supposedly as the net result. Along the bottom, a news crawl repeats bombing-related headlines constantly.

— Media after the London bombings: compare and contrast, at Bob Harris

He's got a point. There's a larger one to be made about the very format of US news (and some of its imitators) of late. That whole jet cockpit-like 'let's bombard the viewer with multiple streams of trvialities' approach, it fosters neither reflection nor calm.

24 degrees Celsius, 70% RH, feels like 34

...feels like trying to breath underwater. And that's at midnight. I'd rather not comment on what it was like in the afternoon, when it was 33 degrees without the humidity effects.

Oh, okay, I'll comment: Yech. Blech. Bleah. Ugh.

I'm basically an Arctic critter. Dry and cold equals good. Ain't cut out for this shit. 'Specially not with the delightfully timed virus that just moved into my upper respiratory tract. This kinda nonsense is why I left DC. But whereinhell am I supposed to go from here? This is Ottawa, fer cryin' out loud, people. Clean air, cool climate. Or so I heard.