Scalzi on the shocking possibility that Dick Cheney was involved in some wrongdoing.

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--and today, for silme! No point in trying to get away, you might as well just come on down, assume the position, and brace yourself!

Hope your day is long on fabulous, shiny, and awesome, and the coming year brings you so much more fabulous, shiny, and awesome that you'll have to wear shades on your shades and seatbelts on your seatbelts!

And--I really mean it, now--don't forget to live forever!

Happy birthday, wcg

Happy birthday, eqe.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures


--go back to bed.

I thought I was a music fan (of certain types and genres), but I never heard this before. Holy cow, love! (Thanks to "sardine" at Eschaton for cluing me in.)

Hurricane Season is a music and poetry show put on by Climbing Poetree. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

 Birthright Israel, PresenTense, Adath Jeshurun Synagogue, Moderntribe.com, PunkTorah.com and Shemspeed.com are sponsoring my band CAN!!CAN's first long tour...here are the dates if anyone is interested...

Birthright Israel, PresenTense, Adath Jeshurun Synagogue, Moderntribe.com, PunkTorah.com and Shemspeed.com are sponsoring my band CAN!!CAN's first long tour...here are the dates if anyone is interested...

( Read more... )

http://www.shadowunit.org:

"Boundaries"

Day 53. We got up 11ish, got packed up and took stuff out to the car. Since there were, roughly speaking, a ton of other fans doing the same thing, I didn't even try to get a cart, and just schlepped the stuff right out there, in 4 trips or so.

Then I took one more final turn through the dealers' room, and stopped by the video podium in the main ballroom and picked up a dub of Kathy's performance at the Masquerade that they had kindly made for me. Then Kathy and I headed out, stopping for breakfast at Bob Evans and then going to Steven Joel's and France's.

They were asleep, so I had to call them to get them to let me in. Once we were inside, they went back to bed, and before long Kathy and I were snoozing too.

We finally all got going again 5ish, and dinner was made, with Marty, and Crystal and Steven joining Steven Joel and France and her son Alex, and Kathy and me for dinner. It was total yum; chicken and multi-cheese pasta. Great conversation was had, with much storytelling.

Now all the company has left, and we are getting ready for bed. Tomorrow we rise fairly early and start three and a half weeks of lots and lots of driving during the week and cons on the weekend. Between now and when we get home on August 6, we have an estimated 5,600 miles to drive. So it will be grueling at times.

Or was Agatha Christie fascinated by the idea of orphans, adoption and identity issues related to orphans and adoption?

So, obviously it's in no ones best interest for the kids to be sick. That said, today was totally fantastic. Spent most of the day reading to Anika. Miklos demanded kisses and good-night's before bedding back down each time he woke --about every 90 minutes, whoa is me. Meridel, who didn't nap until noonish, spend all day rocking around the bed or the pack-n-play out in the yard and finally fell asleep wearing a wicked grin.

PS: FB shot the sheriff, right? Just checking 'cause I need to be clear that NO bagels were involved...

Kate Bush Cloudbusting: a great song and film I miss this style of video that tells a story rather than showing the singer clutching their lumps or someone else's.

It was the second single released from her no.1 1985 album Hounds of Love. "Cloudbusting" peaked at no.20 in the UK Singles Chart. In the UK it was shown at some cinemas as an accompaniment to the main feature.

The song describes Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich's arrest and incarceration through the eyes of his son, Peter, who later wrote his father's story in "A Book of Dreams," published in 1973. The video was directed by Julian Doyle, conceived by Terry Gilliam and Kate Bush.

Wilhelm Reich's cloudbuster was the inspiration for the song. The cloudbuster (or cloud buster) was developed by Reich with the ostensible purpose of draining clouds of "orgone energy". Reich believed that such energy surrounded the earth, and that a cloudbuster would act as a rain-maker. In Reich's view, clouds and rainfall were natural accumulations of orgone energy, and cloudbusters used "orgone accumulators" attached to pipes. These were intended to focus and direct the collected energy into the atmosphere, thus stimulating cloud growth and rainfall. This is considered pseudoscience, despite Reich's claims of evidence of their operation in experiments he undertook.

Back from Readercon. Tired. Sniffling, which is allergies and/or a con crud cold. As usual, falling into the post-con "it's over? already?" blues...and looking forward to Worldcon.

Overall: This was another good Readercon.

Positives: I made it to several very good panels (which I have notes on and will put some reports together for). I got to see lots of great people I don't see often enough (and meet some new ones). I finally managed to get to the Korean BBQ place after years of not quite making it. (Mmmm, bulgogi.)

Negatives: There were too many people I didn't see: not everyone I would have liked to see made it to the con, and I didn't get enough time with several of the folks who did make it. The hotel Internet was $13/day and really bad; I heard enough complaints that I didn't even bother trying. I just used my cellphone data plan instead, and even shared it out over Wi-Fi for a few folks so they could get to sites that weren't working through the hotel wireless: you know, the really obscure and useless ones like Gmail. I was spoiled by the free and functional wireless at Fourth Street and Penguicon; if this had been either free or functional, I think a lot of people would have been at least marginally satisfied with it.

I'm really wary about the announced "no GoH, single track" plan for next year. It worked for Fourth Street, but that was between 1/3 and 1/4 the size of Readercon and probably would have been a problem had it been much larger. For the first time in a while I didn't pre-register for next year at the con, because I'm wondering if I'll want to go. Watching train wrecks isn't nearly as much fun when you're on the train.

I'm really glad I decided to (a) stay at the hotel again and (b) arrive Thursday. There was enough con on Thursday night and Friday morning to justify the extra day (to the detriment of folks who couldn't get there until after work Friday, unfortunately). I don't see going to a single programming track as likely to improve that issue either.

It must be the end o' the world as we know it...

http://www.hurricaneseasontour.com/live/

Saw this last night. The artists are *excellent*, fusing poetry, dance, and multimedia into an extraordinarily inspiring, powerful whole. The theatre is also an amazing space.

Last night and the night before, markgritter and I watched Lust, Caution, an Ang Lee movie about a woman struggling with collaborationists in wartime Shanghai. (It's two and a half hours long, and my ability to read subtitles gave out at about the two hour mark.) And the thing is: I didn't have nearly enough of the cultural references to be able to see the shape of this story coming. None. I am used to being able to--well, not just predict things coming in movies, although that's a big part of it. But I am also used to being able to see the shape pretty clearly in retrospect--not just what happened, but why that was the way they went, what they were trying to do with it, which details were important after all.

At one point I said to myself, "If it was me writing it, this would be the part where they attempted to obtain for themselves Batman-like superpowers. Or at least James Bond-like ones." Then a bit later, "If it was me writing it, this would be the bit where they consulted a traditional Chinese magic practitioner, probably a Taoist." And then later yet, "Ah! I see now! This is where it becomes important that the jeweler is Indian, because India is still part of Britain and belligerent with the Japanese at this point in the war."

Needless to say, I was wrong at every turn.

It was a very nifty kind of wrong, though, a poking of assumptions about story shape but also cultural assumptions about which details were important and telling. If I had been looking for jumping-off points for similar stories, it would have been a neat way to do it, too; as it is, I am trying to wrangle the stories I've got and do not want to get into the Chinese Taoist magic practitioners vs. the Japanese in wartime Shanghai, because I don't have the background for that. (If you do, though, write it for me. It'd be awesome.) I would definitely recommend it as an exercise: picking a movie from a culture somewhat removed from your own and stopping the movie several times to say where you think it's going, seeing what you've missed and what you've mistaken. It's kind of fun. And it doesn't have to be a culture about which you're completely ignorant--I am nothing like an expert on China, but I know a great deal more about China than I do about, say, Ghana, and it still worked beautifully. And unintentionally, but I've often said my main talent is getting the wrong end of the stick in interesting ways.