Roadrunner Twice

Happy Independence Day!

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:46:04 GMT

Noted public asshole dead at 86.

Huh! Serendipitous timing.

NB. There will be very few Dates in this History.

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:17:14 GMT

"Henry the 4th ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin & predecessor Richard the 2nd, to resign it to him, & to retire for the rest of his Life to Pomfret Castle, where he happened to be murdered."

My god. Maybe the time has come to give Ms. Austen another shot. Project G e-texts of P&P and Emma hereby gotten.

PS: curl -O http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/austen/accessible/images/page[1-36]full.jpg And a solid thank you to the British Library.

PSS: Aaaaaalso...

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:45:56 GMT

So I've been loving the Amazon MP3 store in general, but I just this week discovered (h/t Daring Fireball) the MP3 Deals section of the site. It is fantastic. Never mind the stuff at the top and front of the page; the real meat is at the bottom and in the sidebar—that "Daily Deal" box has already netted me Rocket to Russia for $2 and The Best of Talking Heads for $4. They've also got a Twitter feed, if you'd rather not load the page every day.

On Whalewatching

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:06:09 GMT

You know the Fail Whale, yes? Yes. May I risk an interpolation? The Fail Whale fascinates because the Fail Whale is us. No, that's not profound, given that it's the explicit point of the page in the first place. But it's worth keeping in mind whenever you encounter him. That smile on his face? Be like that. You've got birds, man.

Home Darwinism

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:54:18 GMT

The fleas in my room are discovering the hard way that bumping into my leg hairs will tell me exactly where they are. Selection pressure! So, flea starvation vs. rise of the super ninja fleas -- I call it as about 50/50.

This post is actual size, but it seems much bigger to me.

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:43:25 GMT

The LURID and thrilling confessions of a real-life essay addict!!!

Things I Read During June

The Best American Essays 2007, David Foster Wallace, ed. (6/10?)

Every once in a while, I get a powerful urge to read a whole bunch of really good essays. The form fascinates me, and I love that the blogging revolution has kicked off a new golden age for it. But the thing about blogs, even the best ones, is that they’re more or less uncurated, and the best treasures drift through the feeds with no more fanfare than the clicks and hisses of daily life do. It’s not a good medium for bingeing. Thus, the only thing to do when the hunger hits is to hole up with a good anthology or an old Joan Didion book or something. As you can see, this year’s run was DFW-themed!

Also, um, I apparently reviewed every essay in the book. (WHUT.)

Ian Buruma – “The Freedom to Offend” – Meh. I largely agree, but still, meh.
Malcolm Gladwell – “What the Dog Saw” – Yes, it’s about the Dog Whisperer, whatever, but the interviews with the body-language experts were enlightening, and fun in that classic poppy, science-y, Gladwell-y way. By the way, did anyone else see that SGR interlude with him in it? I will never be able to think of him in any other way. I bet he was cavorting across the ceiling while writing this.
Mark Grief – “Afternoon of the Sex Children” – Yeah, that bothers me, too. Not too taken with the essay itself, though.
John Lahr – “Petrified” – A meditation on stage fright. Liked it. I didn’t know Stephen Fry ran away from home in the ’90s!
Louis Menand – “Name That Tone” – Precise, bass-heavy, and hilarious. And thank you for stepping up and being the one to say this, it makes me feel much better about edging up on 30.
Daniel Orozco – “Shakers” – Far, far too precious and self-impressed. No thank you.
Cynthia Ozick – “Out From Xanadu” – Boy, do I love a well-placed nettle. This one was in the same class as “Name That Tone.”
Molly Peacock – “Passion Flowers in Winter” – The mix of subjects was a bit forced, but a: Peacock is honest about it being so, and b: it’s a powerful treatment of its themes regardless.
Phillip Robertson – “In the Mosque of Imam Ali” – Iraq war post-gonzo meta-journalism. Frightening, depressing, fascinating.
Marilynne Robinson – “Onward, Christian Liberals” – The title had me expecting a boring-ass “Where are all the Christian progressives?!” chirp, circa 2005. NO. This, my friends, is a hard-core old-fashioned theological rhubarb, and it is glorious. Also, way to rehabilitate Calvin for me — “total depravity” and the like tended to hang me up, but this seems a more nuanced/lifelike angle on him.
Richard Rodriguez – “Disappointment” – There was nothing here for me.
Elaine Scarry – “Rules of Engagement” – War crimes, yay. Some of her points are significantly less than watertight, but god damn that’s still a lot of vile policy. (Storming hospitals? Yeah, stop doing that please.)
Roger Scruton – “A Carnivore’s Credo” – Look. I mostly agree with what you’re saying — there’s nothing inherently evil about the predator/prey relationship, sure, fine. But if you wanted to arrive legitimately at the place where this essay ends up, the burden was on you to demonstrate why eating meat is morally equivalent or morally better than not eating meat, and your arguments were so weak (if everyone who thinks hard about their food goes vegetarian, then only people who eat unmindfully will be eating meat? Great! We just keep reducing that second number, and we’re suddenly using fewer resources and in a much better position to handle the global food crisis! Seriously, is that all you’ve got?) as to ultimately just beg that question. And no, you may not have it. Essay failed. (Keep trying, though — that piety angle seemed to be going somewhere, just not there.)
Peter Singer – “What Should a Billionaire Give — and What Should You?” – Damn good question. Singer gets closer to an answer than anyone else I’ve heard talk about this, but it’s still an insanely difficult thing to think about. Also, this is as good a place to mention that I… I kind of like Bill Gates these days. I know, I know.
Jerald Walker – “Dragon Slayers” – Wow.
Edward O. Wilson – “Apocalypse Now” – If I were a religious person (even — no, especially — one with a liberal bent), I do not see how I could get through this without being quite offended. I have to wonder whether this was really intended to speak to evangelicals, or whether it was ultimately written for sanctimonious thrills. (If it sounds like the inside of my head sounded in late 2004, you should probably try writing a different open letter to church leaders. Just saying.)

Except for the ones I didn’t get to:

Jo Ann Beard – “Werner”
Mark Danner – “Iraq: The War of the Imagination”
W.S. Di Piero – “Fathead’s Hard Times”
George Gessert – “An Orgy of Power”
Marione Ingram – “Operation Gomorrah”
Garret Keizer – “Loaded”

Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki – The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, vol. 1 (ed. Carl Horn) (6/8?)

This was cool as hell. I will leave the explication to shaenon and simply add my endorsement.

Elizabeth Bear and Emma Bull – Shadow Unit: Refining Fire (6/10)

Christ. That was, uh, cathartic. Not particularly enjoyable, but at least a solid story?

I seem to have learned some heretofore unknown things about myself and my squicks. Like I mentioned last month, the first part where the dude makes Chaz drink water out of his hands just about made me throw up, and the further iterations didn’t get much better. Likewise all the mind-rape. We’re talking, like, visceral squick, of a sort I don’t think I’ve really felt before from a story. I only kept going because I already cared about the characters; if this had been about people I hadn’t let into my brain yet, I’d have dropped it like a hot potato. A hot potato filled with tarantulas.

Kelly Link – Stranger Things Happen (6/11)

It was a Kelly Link sort of day, so I went through this collection and hoovered up everything I hadn’t yet gotten to.

“Vanishing Act” – You know who this one made me think of? Stephen King. It had the feel of one of his not-scary short stories.
“Survivor’s Ball, or, The Donner Party” – I didn’t think much of this one qua story, but there was this thing it did really well. It’s this: you know that phenomenon where a person you meet traveling seems to fit you like a glove and be the exact right person to be with right now, except that actually they’re not and they don’t, and the sinking-in of that feels kind of like a car driving off the road in slow motion?
“Shoe and Marriage” – Well, that explains why “Miss Kansas on Judgement Day” didn’t feel particularly complete, doesn’t it. (Shoes? Marriage? Well, okay.)
“Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water” – I don’t know my PKD, so I can’t tell whether there was anything interesting packed in the title reference.

This felt more like a Miranda July or Aimee Bender story than a Kelly Link one.
“Louise’s Ghost” – You were never a dog!

This is one of the better ones in the collection. Link sometimes throws huge slews of Mysterious Stuff into her stories, and whether this is a strength or a failing will tend to come down to the reader. At its worst, it can make a story seem unfocussed and scattershot (see: “Stone Animals,” “Shoe and Marriage”), but it can also, as it does here, make for a hypnotic sense of interconnectedness and a particularly devastating payoff.
“The Girl Detective” (reread) – …And this is one where Link’s kitchen-sink-ism falls a little flat, but there are enough truly wonderful paragraphs in it that I don’t particularly care.

Jo Walton – Farthing (Tor.com free ebook) (6/15)

A good-natured little cozy mystery about power, privilege, fascism, genocide, evil, and afternoon tea.

I lie, it’s not the slightest bit good-natured. It is, however, good.

The crux of the setting for this series* is that Churchill didn’t get his way, the UK didn’t get any American assistance to speak of, and the Third Reich DID get possession of the Continent. A faction within the Parliament known as the Farthing Set struck a peace with the Reich, and the UK has survived the war as a sovereign nation — shame about Europe, though. (An image invoked by one of the narrators is of a perfect little flower garden in the midst of an ocean of shit.) The plot centers on the murder of the man who negotiated the Nazi peace, as investigated by an honest cop and a sort of Jenna Bush character (who grew up surrounded by the sort of privilege that only the English aristocracy really know how to do and then went and married a Jew.)

Like I said, this story is about power, privilege, and fascism, and it’s a deeply cynical and ironic book, full of all kinds of nasty little reversals. I felt a little sick and dizzy while reading it, and — spoiler — it doesn’t end particularly well. I cannot wait to get my hands on the rest of the series.

Please go read it. Aside from it being an honest and deftly characterized gem of a novel, it is engaged in an extended thought experiment of no small importance. To wit: We’ve learned from experience what it costs to dismantle a fascist empire when we have a great deal of luck on our side; what on earth might it cost to dismantle a Reich for which everything is going as planned?

As of the end of Farthing, god only knows.

Cherie Priest – Four and Twenty Blackbirds (Tor.com free ebook) (6/16, didn’t finish)

I’m not a practiced reader of the form, so it took me about two and a half chapters to realize this was, in fact, totally a Gothic. At which point I was like, “I’m out.”

I’m sure it was a perfectly good Gothic! It’s just that said genre is entirely too rich for my blood, and I was expecting a rather different sub-breed of ghost story.

David Foster Wallace – Consider the Lobster (6/26)

I left an essay or two unread, here — partially because I’d finally sated The Hunger, and partially in obedience to some obscure hoarding instinct. (Never know when you’ll find yourself needing a Wallace infusion, right? Now that I think of it, it was the same deal with that Kelly Link book.)

Steven Brust – Agyar (6/28)

I find myself in a bind w/r/t explaining what made this book so good, as part of it has to do with some formal tricks and slow revelations which are delicate and easy to spoil. (If you’re seeing this on Goodreads, don’t click through to the book’s page and risk seeing a summary — I enjoyed it greatly despite having been spoiled, but trust me on this one.)

At any rate, this is the story of a very bad person trying — perhaps futilely — to become something else. It’s a thing that’s been done before, but no previous attempt has left me so convinced nor quite so full of doubts. This is a dazzlingly good novel which deftly avoids becoming any of the several things one thinks along the way that it might be. Read it.

Hope Larson – Gray Horses (graphic novel, 6/29)

(…and yes, emmling, I blame you for the little internal voice that made me double-check the title spelling.)

I can see myself re-reading this fairly often. It’s… meditative. And textured. Yes, I think those are the words I’m looking for.

Also, the emotional and temporal spaces it’s about are ones I seem to inhabit more often than not. Shelf with Kiki’s Delivery Service, I think.

* Do you know, I’ve noticed a funny thing about these Tor.com freebies…

Okay, so this is the first book post I’ve done in tandem with my Goodreads thing. I think I’m liking Goodreads a lot, but I’m still working out the kinks in my, uh, methods. For now, I'm ending up with rougher versions of my reviews over there, and anything that's not in their database (short stories, Shadow Unit, etc.) ends up here exclusively. In exchange, I'll be trying to update Goodreads a bit more evenly for people who don't have time to read the whole enchilada over here.

Let me know if you want me to switch anything around.

Cat drama

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:01:19 GMT

So we're going to be getting a pair of kittens on Thursday, who will be joining our big dumb bachelor-cat, Stefan. And I'm all antsy now about how well they're going to get along.

The thing is, we're actually doing this more for the cat than we are for ourselves. Really. He's not always a well-behaved kitty, but he's an innately social kitty, and losing first his housemate and then the neighbor cat has left him lonely and insecure and needy. It'll be nice to have kittens around, but it'll be even nicer to have a community of animals again.

Yes, you have to be careful about anthropomorphizing your pets. Yes, cats have different social needs than monkeys do. But we've lived with Stefan for edging up on a decade now, and I think we're qualified to say he needs non-human companionship. I think.

Anyway, can you tell it's been a while since we've done this?

EDIT: All salmon bots must be destroyed. I'm removing my AIM account from my profile info.

Philosopher Dirtbike

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 05:25:45 GMT

I'll tell you a secret: As I age, I become more and more sympathetic to Plato.

In conclusion, all "salmon" AIM bots must be destroyed.

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 02:30:57 GMT

Who's depressed about the FISA capitulation bill/protection of rich lawbreakers act today? Nick's depressed about it! Yes he iiiiiiiis!

Actually, I had a pretty fantastic day, and will continue to do so once I stop thinking about the fate of my beloved country. But Jesus, maintaining any sort of hope for the future of civil society these days is FUCKING HARD. I mean, I liked the 4th Amendment, you know?

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 06:15:32 GMT

I guess the desktop screenshot meme is back?

It's Minneapolis! Uh, I always forget what lake this is? It's at least near the Lake of the Isles. It looks idyllic, but There Are Bugs. No, I don't remember what that salmon-colored thing floating on the water is.
Note inevitable corvid joke.
I have a little bit of magnification on my dock. Yes, it's flashy and silly-looking and very 10.0, but it turns out that it actually makes the dock targets easier to hit--in effect, making the right-hand side of the screen taller than the left side. Who knew?
None of this transparent menu bar nonsense.
The folders along the bottom are permanent and extremely important, but they're far too boring to explain.
The busier I am, the messier the desktop gets. Once I'm done with something, I usually try to clean it up.

In conclusion, these idiotic "salmon" AIM bots must be destroyed.

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:24:02 GMT

So. Remember the recent Supreme Court decision that Habeas Corpus still applies to humans imprisoned in the Gulag? One guess what McCain thinks of it. (via Digby.)

Also, breaking news!

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:25:11 GMT

I love it TO DEATH. (Hat tip: Amanda at Pandagon.)

(Link credit: TUAW)

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:54:30 GMT

Oh finally, PERFECT. Someone has slapped together the correct way (Mac only) to view PDFs in Firefox. (Downloading the file and opening it in Preview: incorrect. Installing Adobe's asinine plugin: incorrect. Click on the link and it just shows the damn PDF, right-click if you need anything fancy: correct. Thanks for playing, we have our winner.)

(Yes, Safari got this right years ago.)

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:59:35 GMT

Happy Firefox 3 day! Hook it up!

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:25:48 GMT

Justice Scalia: Craven, power-worshipping scoundrel

The story isn't that the court affirmed habeas corpus and the rule of law yesterday; it's that it did so by a 5-4 margin. Let it not be forgotten.

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:34:56 GMT

Gimme That Old-Time Religion

Garfield is Metal

Can I Hit It and Quit It

In which video games from the '90s are played

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:16:53 GMT

Twelve years after the fact, I finally caught up with the cool kids and played through Suikoden. And whoa hey, it was totally great.

I missed the whole Suikoden boat the first time around. I actually rented the game sometime around 1997 and came away totally underwhelmed -- I think the problem was that I had also just rented Beyond the Beyond, and it left a bad enough taste in my mouth that Suikoden's low-res battle textures and slightly gimmicky camerawork were tainted by association. Plus, the first few hours of the game aren't really very compelling, and at the time I didn't have any expectation that it would get any more interesting.

(Also, my god, that box art.)

Anyway, I eventually picked up a used copy, which sat around for years before I finally got around to playing it. But play it I did.

I'm actually kind of surprised at how sophisticated it was, and at the way it alternately honored and thumbed its nose at genre conventions. For example: Your main character is a silent cipher whom everyone admires for his natural leadership ability, sure, but he's also one of the fastest characters in battle, profoundly middlin' in attack strength (especially in the first 3/4 of the game), uses a stick for a weapon, and has all of the darkness-powered instant kill spells in the game. He's a Fresh-Faced Hero in his plot role, but his stats read more like some formerly evil character you'd recruit during the endgame. That's... kind of neat.

I also like the way almost every new capability you can get derives from people power. Upgrading your headquarters, getting better armor and weapons, winning army battles, customizing the interface... it's all about who you know, rather than about what you collect. And the characterization is surprisingly deft for how anemic it is -- pretty much all of the 108 characters felt more solid and real than anyone in, say, Chrono Cross's cast. The writers showed an impressive understanding of the limits they were working under, and they made pretty good decisions about what to leave to the imagination. I think their skill in writing rough sketches that hint at vast depth is a major reason for the dedication of the series' fanfic community. Take the "where are they now" title sequence at the end of the game, for instance -- why did those two characters split up? Why did he run away? What was she doing in the resistance in the first place? Something about it sets the brain on fire.

The plot is fairly basic, but it has some nasty tricks up its sleeves -- I love the way they subverted the mind-control trope at the very last moment, and recruiting 3/5 of the top generals alive while having to actually kill your own father was flat-out painful.

Hell, even the graphics and sound had a lot more going on than I once thought -- I like how they weren't afraid to draw all kinds of animations they were only going to use once, and the character portraits were gorgeous.

All told, I judge it a pretty sweet little game. Onward to Suikoden II. (Pirated, alas; check out what that sucker's netting on eBay these days, ugh.)

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:00:03 GMT

Steven Cloud, of BOASAS fame, points us Twitter users to a delightful music video. (Warnings: shag carpeting, nekkid folk.)

EDIT: Also, via matociquala: Dennis Kucinich reading articles of impeachment on the floor of the House.

His presidential bids have always been doomed from the start (alas, the country is still not ready for its first Goblin-American president), and this gesture is windmill-tilting at best, but man, I've always liked Kucinich. Thanks, dude, for getting up there and saying it.

Also, via benchilada: Flame on! And, uh, keep flaming.

Progress marches occasionally on

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 06:05:56 GMT

I may have previously noted here that printers give me the rage. By and large, they are flimsy plastic pieces of crap, prone to gleeful jamming and inventive modes of bustage. Also, the market in which they're designed and sold is filled with perverse and depraved incentives, resulting in such divers sins as competing on features rather than on quality, spending huge development resources on preventing people from refilling ink cartridges, crafting some stupendously ugly-ass software UI, and abandoning driver support for perfectly functional hardware because staying solvent requires breathtakingly wasteful obsolescence cycles. If we're talking about multifunction printers, take all that and multiply by four. The next time I personally spend anything on printing equipment, I'm going to buy some industrial hulk of a black-only laser printer that I can expect to work with every OS upgrade 'til kingdom bloody well come, because honestly, I was sick of this shit after the first three hundred printer catastrophes I had to deal with.*

Nevertheless. If you find yourself in a situation where you absolutely need a printer-scanner with a fax function,** you could absolutely do worse than the HP Officejet J6450 that the nursery just bought. It's pretty cool. You know how "sharing" a printer over the network in Windows is totally frustrating and difficult? Nuh-uh. You just plug this thing into your router -- you don't even have to bother with a USB cord, you just chuck an ethernet cable into the thing or use the built-in wireless link -- and it works, equally well for every computer in the house. Modulo installing the drivers and what have you, but it fucking works. It's got a built-in duplexer, print-to-fax seems to work great (although for some reason it's not mentioned anywhere in the manual?!), and the print-head alignment routine seems to be totally automated by some kind of robot eye inside the casing.

All told, I am favorably impressed, and will remain so until it inevitably starts getting drunk and slapping me around at the breakfast table.

_____
* This is the point where I call out the tendency among nontechnical sorts to expect the resident Software Whisperer to be able to fix the printer. People, family members, NO. This is like asking that cousin who's good with pre-1989 Fords to help get your salvaged flying saucer off the ground, never mind that it takes no fewer than eight prehensile tentacles just to pop the hood on the damn thing.

** Because, see, the nursery business still runs almost entirely on fax, and we can't operate without the capability to send a document to 15-20 people's machines directly from MS Word/OpenOffice. If there were any other way to do this that wasn't worse, believe that we'd be using that, but instead here we are.

Primary sources

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 05:17:40 GMT

Go read this. Seriously. Historical documents with which to blow your mind. (h/t Digby.)

(Then compare and contrast to certain corners of the modern discourse. (Have I mentioned how nice it is to see Jesse back again? Hell yes.))

Things I Read During May

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:06:25 GMT

Got my computer back, so I might as well do my book post.

Things I Read During May

So, my note-keeping system is a bit of an odd duck, and if I’m sleepwalking, I can sometimes tell it to put a single review in a completely different file. So here’s a lost sheep from March:

Gordon Korman – Beware the Fish! (3/13)

Another of those Korman books I was on about. This one is from 1980, and it is riotously funny. A boarding school is running out of money, and its most infamous pair of students start scheming to save it. They also start accidentally terrorizing the countryside with televised warnings about “Operation Popcan” and “Operation Flying Fish.” Hijinks ensue, as do the Mounties. Props to a book that both 9-year-old Nick and 26-year-old Nick can laugh at.

Oh, but someone really should have fumigated this one for saidbookisms. What is it about kids’ books that makes these acceptable? Editors in every other category stomp ’em like roaches, but I remember them being just part of the fabric of kid-lit.

…so then I went on a short story binge on the Tacoma bus.

Sarah Monette – “Sundered” (5/1) – Liked it. A story about aloofness and siblings and friendship and the wickedness of fangirls.
Leonard Richardson – “Mallory” (5/2) – This one was fantastic! Glitchy, energetic, maybe a bit mannered (Cory at BoingBoing described it as “[reading] like the first three paragraphs of Snow Crash”), but in a lot of ways, it was exactly what I want from a story. It spoke to me, man.

Although it ended way before I wanted it to—I can see why he did it that way, and it was a good choice, but… I actually really wanted to find out what the GAME was trying to do, and maybe witness the accomplishment of that goal.
Jessica Reisman – “Flowertongue” (5/2) – No one writes letters like this anymore. It seems a loss.
Will Shetterly – “Taken He Cannot Be” (5/2) – Doc Holliday and the unicorn. I’ll assume you already know whether you want to click that. It didn’t do a whole lot for me.
Mary Robinette Kowal – “Death Comes But Twice” (5/2) – You know what this reminded me of? Those old-time radio compilation shows they used to have on KIRO late at night. They were filled with short little antique-feeling horror tales like this one, and I couldn’t get enough of ’em.
Mary Robinette Kowal – “For Solo Cello, op. 12” (5/2) – YIKES. A brutal and rather sickening little fable. Well-executed, but, well, ugh.

Cory Doctorow – Little Brother (5/10)

This book put the righteous wrath in me. More wrath than I’ve probably felt since I was 16. And since that seems to be what Doctorow was aiming for, I say kudos.

Dr. Peter D’Adamo – Eat Right For Your Type (5/10)

This book came up in a conversation with Kathleen before she went east — a relative of hers had gotten significant benefit from following some or another nugget of counterintuitive advice from it, which sort of thing is perfect grist for our style of shit-shooting. Anyway, I thought the premise sounded too weird to ignore, so I checked it out from the library.

Basically, D’Adamo says that your blood type determines (or is at least the primary influence on) your metabolism and your ability to digest specific foods, and follows with a rather detailed rundown on how you should be eating. He backs this edifice up with his personal clinical experience (presented as a series of anecdotes dispersed throughout the text) and some extremely dodgy anthropology that reminds me of nothing so much as the Jakeskin from Templar, AZ. In terms of references to peer-reviewed studies demonstrating the mechanisms he postulates, well, not so much. (And he lets slip once or twice that he advocates homeopathy. Red flag!) So I was skeptical. But honestly? I found myself wanting to believe what he was saying. Mostly because of this feeling that ABO blood types have to be good for something besides transfusion complications and manga character taxonomy. Really, why shouldn’t the, you know, very makeup of your humours affect your digestion? And this, friends, is probably why the book managed to become such a big hit.

Anyway, like I said, I checked it out. Apparently, as a Type O (The mighty hunter(/gatherer)! Roaming the African Plains in search of MEAT! Never mind that most of the protein in the appropriator diet seems to have come from bugs), I should be eating approximately the diet that my Type A (The vegetarian farmer! GRAAAAIIIIINNNZZZZ!) sister eats, while she in turn ought to be craving the pseudo-vegetarian diet that comes naturally to me. Reductionism and uninstinctiveness aside, I still couldn’t, at the end, see any reason to be eating the diet he advocates — it’s all just his word, with nothing concrete to back it up, and the outlook gets even worse when you google “blood type diet” to find out what holes the critics have been poking in D’Adamo’s research/lack-thereof. The plural of “anecdote” is still not “data.”

Unsettlingly, there was a whole bunch of what seemed like genuine insight interspersed with the arrant nonsense—Type Os are supposed to have a particular affinity with broccoli and kales, and boy howdy do I ever—but I ultimately have to write it off as a cognitive artifact. The brain wants patterns, and it will damn well have them, whether or not they’re there at the start.

No, I didn’t actually try the diet. For all I know, it may really be the key to a happy and healthy life. I’m still calling this book a loss.

On the other other other hand, it did provide some inspiration to try giving up wheat for a few weeks, which seems to have caused me to get noticeably thinner with no further effort. So there is that.

(Wait, do you still have an other hand free? In the tiny blood type fortune-telling section at the end of each division of the book, he refers to some historical personage as “the penultimate gambler.” Mister, I am pretty sure that does not mean what you think it does. Just saying.)

Susanna Clarke – The Ladies of Grace Adieu, and other stories (5/11)

Clarke is not a prolific short story writer, so I’d already read three of these, in various anthologies dating back to the ’90s.

Mostly, reading this reminded me why Strange & Norrell was such a great book. Decent enough short stories from a superlative novelist. (Next book? Soon?)

Elizabeth Bear – “Shadow Unit: Overkill” (5/13)

Eew, giblets.

And finally finally finally, we get to see Chaz do something that couldn’t be done by any extremely clever “normal” person. Well played.

Lou Anders, ed – Fast Forward 1 (5/19, remaining stories)

Yeah, I finished reading this.

Robert Charles Wilson – “YFL-500” – Had this story ended in any way other than the way it did, it would have been irritating as hell. But it didn’t!
Justina Robson – “The Girl Hero’s Mirror Says He’s Not the One” – This one was just kind of strange. The incluing was very skilled, so I got the general picture without having read the novel that set up its world, but what I still don’t really get is how any story taking place in such a world can really matter. The story of how such a world came about is probably fascinating (again, haven’t read it), but it seems to me that once you get there, there’s really nothing more to say. Anything written there has to speak primarily to something other than a human, which is, well, a problem.
Paolo Bacipalupi – “Small Offerings” – JESUS. Majorly harsh.
Kage Baker – “Plotters and Shooters” – This was hilarious in several different ways.

You know, I’ve decided I rather like Kage Baker. Except I always mentally pronounce her name as かげ. Same problem as with Neko Case.
Louise Marley – “p dolce” – 19TH CENTURY MUSICOLOGICAL SCIENCE FICTION ABOUT BRAHMS AND CLARA SCHUMANN? WHY YES I WILL, THANK YOU FOR ASKING.
Mike Resnick and Nancy Kress – “Solomon’s Choice” – I do not for even a second believe that something like this situation didn’t come up at least once before. C’mon. And I also have a nagging feeling that they were somehow cheating on the way the memory transmission works.
Ian McDonald – “Sanjeev and Robotwallah” – Possibly the best deconstruction of Gundam I’ve yet read — which is saying something since Gundam tends to deconstruct itself, but this adds several very welcome layers and a really impressively-rendered setting, and all that with a more-than-worthy prose style. Nice.
Pamela Sargent – “A Smaller Government” – Okay, cute.
George Zebrowski – “Settlements” – Undoubtedly the worst story in the bunch. Seriously awful prose, didactic as all hell, and just plain boring. Please skip.
Paul Di Filippo – “Wikiworld” – A bit mannered and hyperactive. (The narrator is a crappy writer. I can’t tell whether Di Filippo is any good.) And the plot was kind of pointless — really, it’s just a silly exercise in Wikipedian absurdism. Which, okay, fine.

At any rate, Lou Anders has proven himself an editor to watch out for.

David Foster Wallace – Consider the Lobster (essay collection)

This one’s still in-progress, but I’ve read “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think,” “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” “Up, Simba,” and “Consider the Lobster.”

Turns out I still like David Foster Wallace! Yea, I will carry my love of footnote abuse even unto the grave. Believe.

“Up, Simba” was particularly weird to read in 2008, it being an account of a week or two following McCain’s entourage in 2000. Really, I’m still not sure what to think of it all. Did all that really happen? Was that the same person?

Elizabeth Hand – Generation Loss (5/28)

A lovely little confection of dread.

There’s no explicit danger or freakiness for the first three-quarters or so of Generation Loss, but it’s nevertheless steeped in a suffocating aura of menace. The threatening atmosphere rises like steam from the characters’ photographs and the beautifully-rendered descriptions of the Maine landscape. The book has a great narrative voice, and an anti-heroine who attracts and repels in equal measure.

Alas, I don’t think Hand really stuck the dismount—perhaps it’s just that the miasma of evil was so effectively set up that it was impossible to live up to; I don’t know. (And I’m not sure how we were supposed to go on rooting for the protagonist after, well, that.) Still, it’s a more than worthy read, and unlike anything else I’ve read lately.

Also,

…I started to read the final episode of Shadow Unit season 1, but I couldn’t get past the first part. It was just too squicky—when the guy was making Chaz drink out of his hands, I nearly threw up in my mouth. I still want to know what happens, though, so I’ll try again this month.

Sail easy, Bikke

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 04:13:01 GMT

tomax, a dear and old friend of mine, has died in his sleep. He was a grand fellow, and was always ready with bizarre and impractical advice. And now he's gone, and it's not bloody fair.

WOW

Fri, 30 May 2008 04:27:11 GMT

Everyone's family has something of a Greatest Hits collection -- stories that get repeated over and over again, sometimes gaining layers of-- aw, fuckit, you know, all that This American Life intro-sequence bull. Whatever! My point is, there's this great Fagerlunds/Delongs crossover episode from somewhere around 1990 involving a possum living inside a double-paned window in our garage, which I have gotten plenty mileage out of. We just discovered that we have it on video.

I have GOT to find some way to get this sucker uploaded. Watch this space... for frightened men and confused possums in garbage cans.

Product Anti-recommendation

Thu, 29 May 2008 22:22:48 GMT

Readers may remember that I have twice had to send in my MacBook for repair of a squirrelly hardware issue involving the sleep system. Said issue has now recurred for a third round of trouble. It's going back in for more repairs on the "loop" or "white glove" repair track.

Based on my experience, and on my conversations with the product specialists over at AppleCare, I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone purchase a first generation -- i.e. "Core Duo" (not to be confused with "Core 2 Duo") -- Macbook in any condition. This issue has happened to more computers than just mine, and if it happens to your machine, it cannot be reasonably coped with unless the unit is still under full AppleCare coverage. And even with "free" repair service, the cost in time, effort, and aggravation is substantial. Purchasing one of these MacBooks used would be hardware roulette, and should only be attempted if you're being offered a really good deal. As in, good enough that you'll have got your money's worth within a few months.

EDIT: But I should point out that the people I've dealt with at AppleCare have been pretty cool. I generally loathe dealing with tech support, but the AC folk are mostly not clueless.

Thu, 29 May 2008 05:19:39 GMT

Huh. Strange wind, tonight.