I'm worried about Fafnir

... but I'm still laughin'.

Here's to those who, when they go mad, do so entertainingly.

Taps

Further to previous, the laptop is pretty much dead.

Cleaned it out, powered it back up, all looked good, for about 20 seconds...

And then it looks like something analog went south in the video subsystem. Screen started flickering unhappily, going an unpleasant shade of white...

Doesn't look good. Damn. It was a nice ole' T41 I'd grown quite fond of.

(Plays 'Taps', mournfully...)

Oh, my

Okay. This really isn't fair...

But damn, it's funny.

Believe I've mentioned previously, I've got this thing about really, really, really hostile reviews. They amuse me. The sheer nastiness and hauteur a thoroughly pissed-off critic can muster, that's a beautiful thing, in its own misanthropic little way.

And so, for your enjoyment, I present Tom Eaton's deliciously consistently nasty review of the latest Rowling book*.

Look at this thing. Sheer perfection. Not a single paragraph (unless the byline counts) that doesn't take a new swipe. Favourite excerpt, methinks:

Still, when they’re not being human filth, they are devouring the apparently endless sludge of platitude, cliché and middle-class smugness dished up by Rowling, which is better than them licking razor-blades and throwing hand-grenades at poor people. Enter the “at least they’re reading” school of thought, clung to by parents who have clearly long since surrendered their parenting duties to teachers and television.

It is a philosophy that has spawned a curious piece of logic: if you get children reading schlock, they’ll grow into adults who will explore the classics. This is rather like hoping that if you get your child addicted to crack, he’ll quickly develop a fine nose for wines and a taste for haute cuisine.

— Tom Eaton, Buckets of banality, a dash of honey, now turn this turgid tome to money!

Ouch.

Now, for the record, no, I don't really think this of Rowling. And Eaton's hauteur, in this case, smells strongly of a certain anti-escapist snobbery I and others have noted previously. I think fantasy's got its place (obviously) and can certainly justify the cost of the paper it's printed on, done artfully enough. And my opinion of Rowling, specifically is that's certainly better than average children's fare, judging from what little I've read, really. Think it was a Guardian critic (can't seem to find her this morning) who said it best, saying roughly: listen, they're not bad. Not great, but not bad. And if everyone hadn't been jumping up and down and saying these books are the greatest thing since sliced bread, we'd still have the perspective to say so.

Also, for the record, I actually lined up this time at midnight. Yep. I did. Though, honestly, this was only because (follow this) (i) my lovely wife has been following the series pretty closely, doesn't want some loose-lipped twit or other to give away who gets killed before she can read it for herself, and so (ii) preordered for pickup at the crazy midnight 'opening' at a funky little toy store down the street so she can rush through it quickly enough to make this unlikely, but then (iii) conked out early (she's not nocturnal like me), and muttered, sleepily, honey, could you please go pick it up, thanks?

And so, dutiful husband that I am, I did, notwithstanding that I'm about as tired as a lot of other people of hearing about somebody who's outselling every other novelist on the freakin' planet (oh no, no jealousy here, dahlink). And saw a line full (musta been a few hundred, I'd say) of people, waiting at midnight to read a book, of all things. And thus concur, roughly, with those saying: that's probably a good thing, even if the prose is a bit flat, the plot a bit predictable (six books in, same characters, go fig it's getting a bit repetitive), the whole thing getting a bit old...

Okay. Okay. Enough slashing at tall poppies. Haven't read it yet. Probably won't get to it for some weeks at best, so can't say. Leaving the subject, now.

(*Holly points out, perceptively as always, it really is no such thing.)

Fussing, fiddling

About every third time I crack open The Manuscript That Wouldn't Die to cross off one more thing from the to do list, I wind up messing with something else entirely.

Almost entirely dialogue. I really obsess over dialogue, if I let myself. Keep doing these stupid, fiddly little things to scenes, here and there, convinced that naw, that's not quite right... she/he would say it this way...

Thing is, it was certainly arguable some of the scenes getting said treatment did benefit from the attention—and each time I'm sure it's at least an incremental improvement. But then, there's this little matter of priorities. And in honesty, I strongly suspect I'm bumping up against the law of diminishing returns, in a lot of places.

But I can't seem to help myself. It's like scratching an itch or something.

Gonna have to get some discipline here. Pick next thing on the list. Open file. Find that thing. Fix that thing. Save the file. Close the file. Cross thing off list. Repeat. Don't even look anywhere else. Do fiddly polishing stuff, if you still must, after you've finished with the list of stuff you actually know must get done.

Discipline sucks.

(Might note: there's a very similiar phenomenon in the world of software development. It's a truism that the developers never actually want to release the software: they'd keep right on polishing and refining 'til doomsday, if permitted. An architect with whom I used to work used to say 'There comes a time in the life of every project when you must shoot the developers and ship the code.')

Red Sails in the Sunset

A propos of an earlier post, in the end, I hadda order it used. Seems it's out of print on this continent, at least.

Hell, I only had several years when it woulda been so much easier. Procrastination, it's a bad thing. Cross your fingers for me, please.

What I'll be missing over the next few weeks

Mentioning it for you Ottawa denizens: The chamber music festival starts Saturday. My daughter's violin teacher just reminded me.

Always seem to be missing stuff like this, lately. Kids, work, sleep, you know. Gotta try to catch a few things this year, tho'. Mebbe if I can talk our young violinist into coming, it'll be a bit more practical.

Doh!

Poured a substantial portion of a coffee into a laptop this morning.

Was working out of a coffee shop, when it happened. Figured it was a gorgeous morning, why go sit in a hermetically-sealed high tech office? So I stopped, fired up wireless, sat down to answer some email...

And then splash. Woman who'd served it to me looks at it, says, "That doesn't look good."

Nope. Doesn't. Good news: hard drive and motherboard will probably survive. Bad news: keyboard might not. Guess we'll see.

I've been in this biz so long (and others before it involving laptops and their ilk) and this is the first time I've done this. But damn, I did it good when I got 'round to it.

No, context doesn't help

(From the sent mail file... with hopes Michel won't mind that I take bits of the weirdness that always seems to happen when we correspond and excerpt it for public consumption, now and then.

And no, knowing the context of this probably wouldn't help.)

I keep thinking, I need to write some of those 'well blow me down' type expressions. You know the ones—the ones ninety-year old great grammas who've just discovered their husband had a sex change just before their marriage use? 'Well dip me in castor oil and use me as a chimney brush for Inco's highest waste stack.' The kind of entirely incoherently weird thing only someone who's been through the great depression, both world wars, and the several years during which the Osmonds had their own TV show could formulate, and probably only because either malnutrition during the depression and/or excessive exposure to the Osmonds ate holes in their brain resembling those left by Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease.

But whatever it is this actually takes, I don't think I've got the circuitry for it. Keep trying, but so far all I've come up with is:

'Well dip me in honey, roll me in oats, wrap me in cellophane, print the nutritional information and incredients on the side, and sell me for 49 cents.'

... and ...

'Well shave off all my body hair, crazy-glue the pelt of a dead fox to my back*, and chase me through the English countryside blowing a hunting horn.'

... aaand the ever popular ...

'Well break into my home, murder my significant other with your artificial limb, frame me for it, and chase me around the country with a posse of several hundred state troopers, all while uttering staggeringly vapid monologues.'

No. Guess I ain't got it.

(*Yes, it looks like dead animals and glue are becoming a recurring theme with me. Apparently the therapy isn't working.)

Visuals

Also from Nature today, a gas giant discovered in a triple star system:

Konacki's planet is in the triple-star system known as HD 188753, which lies about 149 light years from Earth, in the Cygnus constellation. The star at the centre of the system is very much like our own Sun. Its planet, which is at least 14% larger than Jupiter, orbits the star once every 80 hours or so, at a distance of about 8 million kilometres, a twentieth of the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Two more stars, whirling tightly around each other, orbit the central sun at a distance that would put them between Saturn and Uranus in our own Solar System.

— The triple sunset that should not exist, Nature news, 13 July 2005

Yeah, the ramifications for current ideas about solar system formation are interesting—but I'm more struck by the thought of what the view must be like. And it looks like someone at Nature feels the same way: follow the link for a movie (though the one playing in my head is much better).

Looking for grains of truth in old legends

Nature's got a neat bit today about a research project using aboriginal tales of a malevolent spirit called a'yahos to suss out damage done by an earthquake that occured in the Seattle area around 900 AD. See North American folklore points to dangers for Seattle.

No, not really

Someone just asked, a propos of an earlier post, whether I'm seriously losing my hair and/or wearing a rug.

Answer: no to both, not so much as I've noticed—the 'Herr Pieszc' bit was just an odd bit of randomness—though, I suppose it might well reflect not entirely unreasonable anxieties: my maternal grandfather did eventually go quite bald, and my understanding is male pattern baldness is an autosomal trait, with the gene acting dominant in males, so my odds are probably about one in four I'm carrying his... So far, at any rate, the odd hair's gone a bit grey, is all.

And, for the record, if I do start to lose it, there's no way I'm gluing a dead squirrel up there. Hell, I'd shave it all off, first.

As to what I look like these days, why, just like this.

Oh, okay, no, not really...

No, of course not. That's an old picture.

Jonesing

Realized just now that I haven't heard the Oils' masterful Red Sails in the Sunset in several years now.

Thing is, my (very well-worn) tape (yes, tape; it was another era, people) got munged a long time ago, and I kept saying: oh, I'll see it in a store somewhere on disk, and I'll grab it.

That hasn't happened. And now I'm almost physically shaking with the need to hear 'Jimmy Sharman's Boxers' and 'Who Can Stand in the Way?'... This album used to be bread and butter for me; got no idea how I made it this far.

Time to make a phone call, I guess.